“Is that all?” asked Gladstone. Her brown eyes were very intense.
“No,” I said. “The Consul told them that he had been the one to trigger an Ouster device which hastened the opening of the Time Tombs.”
Hunt sat straight up, his leg dropping off the arm of the chair. Gladstone visibly took a breath. “Is that all?”
“Yes.”
“How did the others respond to his revelation of … betrayal?” she asked.
I paused, tried to reconstruct the dream images in a more linear fashion than memory provided. “Some were outraged,” I said. “But none feels overwhelming loyalty to the Hegemony at this point. They decided to go on. I believe that each of the pilgrims feels that punishment will be dealt out by the Shrike, not by human agency.”
Hunt slammed his fist down on the arm of the chair. “If the Consul were here,” he snapped, “he’d fast discover otherwise.”
“Quiet, Leigh.” Gladstone paced back to her desk, touched some papers there. All of the comm lights were glowing impatiently. I found myself amazed that she could spend such so much time talking to me at such an hour. “Thank you, M. Severn,” she said. “I want you to be with us for the next few days. Someone will show you to your suite in the residential wing of Government House.”
I rose. “I’ll return to Esperance for my things,” I said.
“No need,” said Gladstone. “They were brought here before you had stepped off the terminex platform. Leigh will show you out.”
I nodded and followed the taller man toward the door.
“Oh, M. Severn … ” called Meina Gladstone.
“Yes?”
The CEO smiled. “I did appreciate your candor earlier,” she said. “But from this point on, let us assume you are a court artist and a court artist alone, sans opinions, sans visibility, sans mouth. Understood?”
“Understood, M. Executive,” I said.
Gladstone nodded, already turning her attention to the blinking phone lights. “Very good. Please bring your sketchbook to the meeting in the War Room at 0800 hours.”
A secuity guard met us in the anteroom and started to lead me toward the maze of corridors and checkpoints. Hunt called out for him to stop and strode across the wide hall, his steps echoing on the tile. He touched my arm. “Make no mistake,” he said. “We know … she knows … who you are and what you are and whom you represent.”
I met his gaze and calmly extracted my arm. “That’s good,” I said, “because at this point, I am quite sure that I do not know.”
THREE
Six adults and an infant in a hostile landscape. Their fire seems a small thing against the darkness falling. Above them and beyond them, the hills of the valley rise like walls while closer in, wrapped in the darkness of the valley itself, the huge shapes of the Tombs seem to creep closer like saurian apparitions from some antediluvian age.
Brawne Lamia is tired and aching and very irritable. The sound of Sol Weintraub’s baby crying sets her teeth on edge. She knows the others are also tired; none has slept more than a few hours in the past three nights, and the day just ending has been filled with tension and unresolved terrors. She sets the last piece of wood on the fire.
“There’s no more where that came from,” snaps Martin Silenus. The fire lights the poet’s satyrish features from below.
“I know it,” says Brawne Lamia, too tired to put anger or any other energy into her voice. The firewood is from a cache carried in by the pilgrim groups of years gone by. Their three small tents are set in the area traditionally used by the pilgrims in their last night before confronting the Shrike. They are camped close to the Time Tomb called the Sphinx, and the black sweep of what may be a wing blots out some of the sky.
“We’ll use the lantern when this is gone,” says the Consul. The diplomat looks even more exhausted than the others. The flickering light casts a red tint over his sad features. He had dressed in diplomatic finery for the day, but now the cape and tricornc cap look as soiled and wilted as the Consul himself.
Colonel Kassad returns to the fire and slides the night visor up onto the top of his helmet. Kassad is wearing full combat gear, and the activated chameleon polymer shows only his face, floating two meters above the ground. “Nothing,” he says. “No movement. No heat traces. No sound besides the wind.” Kassad leans the FORCE multipurpose assault rifle against a rock and sits near the others, the fibers of his impact armor deactivating into a matte black not much more visible than before.
“Do you think the Shrike will come tonight?” asks Father Hoyt. The priest has his black cloak wrapped around him and seems as much a part of the night as Colonel Kassad. The thin man’s voice is strained.
Kassad leans forward and pokes the fire with his baton. “There is no way to tell. I’ll stand watch just in case.”
Suddenly all six look up as the star-filled sky spasms with color, orange and red blossoms unfolding silently, obliterating the starfield.
“There hasn’t been much of that in the past few hours,” says Sol Weintraub, rocking his infant. Rachel has quit crying and now tries to grasp her father’s short beard. Weintraub kisses her tiny hand.
“They’re testing Hegemony defenses again,” says Kassad. Sparks rise from the prodded fire, embers floating into the sky as if seeking to join the brighter flames there.
“Who won?” asks Lamia, referring to the silent space battle which had filled the sky with violence all the night before and much of that day.
“Who fucking cares?” says Martin Silenus. He searches through the pockets of his fur coat as if he might find a full bottle there. He does not. “Who fucking cares,” he mutters again.
“I care,” the Consul says tiredly. “If the Ousters break through, they may destroy Hyperion before we find the Shrike.”
Silenus laughs derisively. “Oh, that would be terrible, wouldn’t it? To die before we discover death? To be killed before we are scheduled to be killed? To go out swiftly and without pain, rather than to writhe forever on the Shrike’s thorns? Oh, terrible thought, that.”
“Shut up,” says Brawne Lamia, and her voice again is without emotion but this time is not devoid of threat. She looks at the Consul. “So where is the Shrike? Why didn’t we find it?”
The diplomat stares at the fire. “I don’t know. Why should I know?”
“Perhaps the Shrike is gone,” says Father Hoyt. “Perhaps by collapsing the anti-entropic fields you’ve freed it forever. Perhaps it’s carried its scourge elsewhere.”
The Consul shakes his head and says nothing.
“No,” says Sol Weintraub. The baby is sleeping against his shoulder. “It will be here. I feel it.”
Brawne Lamia nods. “So do I. It’s waiting.” She had retrieved several ration units from her pack, and now she pulls heating tabs and passes the units around.
“I know that anticlimax is the warp and woof of the world,” says Silenus. “But this is fucking ridiculous. All dressed up with nowhere to die.”
Brawne Lamia glowers but says nothing, and for a while they eat in silence. The flames fade from the sky, and the densely packed stars return, but embers continue to rise as if seeking escape.
Wrapped in the dream-hazy tumble of Brawne Lamia’s thoughts twice-removed, I try to reassemble the events since last I dreamt their lives.
The pilgrims had descended into the valley before dawn, singing, their shadows thrown before them by the light from the battle a billion kilometers above. All day they had explored the Time Tombs. Each minute they expected to die. After some hours, as the sun rose and the high desert cold gave way to heat, their fear and exultation faded.
The long day was silent except for the rasp of sand, occasional shouts, and the constant, almost subliminal moan of the wind around rocks and tombs. Kassad and the Consul each had brought an instrument that measured the intensity of the anti-entropic fields, but Lamia had been the first to notice that these were not needed, that the ebb and flow of the time tides could be felt as a slig
ht nausea overladen with a sense of déjà vu which did not fade.
Nearest to the entrance of the valley had been the Sphinx; then came the Jade Tomb, its walls translucent only in morning and evening twilight; then, less than a hundred meters farther in, rose the tomb called the Obelisk; the pilgrim path then led up the widening arroyo to the largest tomb of them all, centrally placed, the Crystal Monolith, its surface devoid of design or opening, its flat-topped roof flush with the tops of the valley walls; then came the three Cave Tombs, their entrances visible only because of the well-worn paths that led to them; and finally—almost a kilometer farther down the valley—sat the so-called Shrike Palace, its sharp flanges and outflung spires reminiscent of the spikes of the creature said to haunt this valley.
All day they had moved from tomb to tomb, none venturing off alone, the group pausing before entering those artifacts which might be entered. Sol Weintraub had been all but overcome with emotion upon seeing and entering the Sphinx, the same tomb where his daughter had contracted the Merlin sickness twenty-six years earlier. The instruments set out by her university team still sat on tripods outside the tomb, although none in the group could tell if they still functioned, carrying out their monitoring duties. The passageways in the Sphinx were as narrow and labyrinthine as Rachel’s comlog entries had suggested, the strings of glow-globes and electric lights left behind by various research groups now dark and depleted. They used hand torches and Kassad’s night visor to explore the place. There was no sign of the room Rachel had been in when the walls closed in on her and the sickness began. There were only vestigial remnants of the once-powerful time tides. There was no sign of the Shrike.
Each tomb had offered its moment of terror, of hopeful and dreadful anticipation, only to be replaced by an hour or more of anticlimax as dusty, empty rooms appeared just as they had to the tourists and Shrike Pilgrims of centuries past.
Eventually the day had ended in disappointment and fatigue, the shadows from the eastern valley wall drawing across the Tombs and valley like a curtain closing an unsuccessful play. The day’s heat had vanished, and the high desert cold returned quickly, borne on a wind that smelled of snow and the high reaches of the Bridle Range, twenty kilometers to the southwest. Kassad suggested that they make camp. The Consul had shown the way to the traditional grounds where Shrike Pilgrims had waited their last night before meeting the creature they sought. The flat area near the Sphinx, showing traces of litter from research groups as well as pilgrims, pleased Sol Weintraub, who imagined his daughter had camped there. No one else objected.
Now, in full darkness with the last piece of wood burning, I sensed the six of them drawing closer … not merely to the fire’s warmth, but to each other … drawn by the fragile but tangible cords of shared experience forged during their voyage upriver on the levitation barge Benares and in their crossing to Keep Chronos. More than that, I sensed a unity more palpable than emotional bonds; it took a moment, but I soon realized that the group was connected in a microsphere of shared data and senseweb. On a world whose primitive, regional data relays had been shredded by the first hint of combat, this group had linked comlogs and biomonitors to share information and to watch over one another as best they could.
While the entry barriers were obvious and solid, I had no trouble sliding past, through, and under them, picking up the finite but numerous clues—pulse, skin temperature, cortical wave activity, access request, data inventory—which allowed me some insight into what each pilgrim was thinking, feeling, and doing. Kassad, Hoyt, and Lamia had implants, the flow of their thoughts were easiest to sense. At that second, Brawne Lamia was wondering if it had not been a mistake to seek out the Shrike; something was nagging at her, just under the surface but unrelenting in its demand to be heard. She felt as if she were ignoring some terribly important clue which held the solution to … what?
Brawne Lamia had always despised mysteries; it was one of the reasons she had left a life of some comfort and leisure to become a private investigator. But what mystery? She had all but solved the murder of her cybrid client … and lover … and had come to Hyperion to fulfill his final wish. Yet she sensed that this nagging doubt had little to do with the Shrike. What?
Lamia shook her head and poked the dying fire. Her body was strong, raised to resist Lusus’s 1.3 standard gravity, and trained to even greater strength, but she had not slept in several days and she was very, very tired. She became vaguely aware that someone was speaking.
“… just to take a shower and get some food,” says Martin Silenus. “Perhaps use your comm unit and fatline link to see who’s winning the war.”
The Consul shakes his head. “Not yet. The ship is for an emergency.”
Silenus gestures toward the night, the Sphinx, and the rising wind. “You think that this isn’t an emergency?”
Brawne Lamia realizes that they are talking about the Consul bringing his spacecraft here from the city of Keats. “Are you sure that the absence of alcohol isn’t the emergency you’re referring to?” she asks.
Silenus glares at her. “Would it hurt to have a drink?”
“No,” says the Consul. He rubs his eyes, and Lamia remembers that he too is addicted to alcohol. But his answer to bringing the ship here had been no. “We’ll wait until we have to.”
“What about the fatline transmitter?” says Kassad.
The Consul nods and removes the antique comlog from his small pack. The instrument had belonged to his grandmother Siri and to her grandparents before her. The Consul touches the diskey. “I can broadcast with this, but not receive.”
Sol Weintraub has set his sleeping child in the opening of the closest tent. Now he turns toward the fire. “And the last time you transmitted a message was when we arrived in the Keep?”
“Yes.”
Martin Silenus’s tone is sarcastic. “And we’re supposed to believe that … from a confessed traitor?”
“Yes.” The Consul’s voice is a distillation of pure weariness.
Kassad’s thin face floats in the darkness. His body, legs, and arms are discernible only as a blackness against the already dark background. “But it will serve to call the ship if we need it?”
“Yes.”
Father Hoyt hugs his cloak tighter around him to keep it from flapping in the rising wind. Sand scrapes against wool and tent fabric. “Aren’t you afraid that the port authorities or FORCE will move the ship or tamper with it?” he asks the Consul.
“No.” The Consul’s head moves only slightly, as if he is too tired to shake it completely. “Our clearance pip was from Gladstone herself. Also, the Governor-General is a friend of mine … was a friend.”
The others had met the recently promoted Hegemony governor shortly after landing; to Brawne Lamia, Theo Lane had seemed a man catapulted into events too large for his talents.
“The wind’s coming up,” says Sol Weintraub. He turns his body to protect the baby from flying sand. Still squinting into the gale, the scholar says, “I wonder if Het Masteen is out there?”
“We searched everywhere,” says Father Hoyt. His voice is muffled because he has lowered his head into the folds of his cloak.
Martin Silenus laughs. “Pardon me, priest,” he says, “but you’re full of shit.” The poet stands and walks to the edge of the firelight. The wind ruffles the fur of his coat and rips his words away into the night. “The cliff walls hold a thousand hiding places. The Crystal Monolith hides its entrance to us … but to a Templar? And besides, you saw the stairway to the labyrinth in the deepest room of the Jade Tomb.”
Hoyt looks up, squinting against the pinpricks of blowing sand. “You think he’s there? In the labyrinth?”
Silenus laughs and raises his arms. The silk of his loose blouse ripples and billows. “How the fuck should I know, Padre? All I know is that Het Masteen could be out there now, watching us, waiting to come back to claim his luggage.” The poet gestures toward the Mobius cube in the center of their small pile of gear. “Or he could be d
ead already. Or worse.”
“Worse?” says Hoyt. The priest’s face has aged in the past few hours. His eyes are sunken mirrors of pain, his smile a rictus.
Martin Silenus strides back to the dying fire. “Worse,” he says. “He could be twisting on the Shrike’s steel tree. Where we’ll be in a few—”
Brawne Lamia rises suddenly and grasps the poet by his shirtfront. She lifts him off the ground, shakes him, lowers him until his face is on a level with hers. “Once more,” she says softly, “and I’ll do very painful things to you. I won’t kill you, but you will wish I had.”
The poet shows his satyr’s smile. Lamia drops him and turns her back. Kassad says, “We’re tired. Everyone turn in. I’ll stand watch.”
My dreams of Lamia are mixed with Lamia’s dreams. It is not unpleasant to share a woman’s dreams, a woman’s thoughts, even those of a woman separated from me by a gulf of time and culture far greater than any imagined gap of gender. In a strange and oddly mirrorlike way, she dreamed of her dead lover, Johnny, of his too-small nose and his too-stubborn jaw, his too-long hair curling over his collar, and his eyes—those too-expressive, too-revealing, eyes that too-freely animated a face which might, except for those eyes, belong to any one of a thousand peasants born within a day’s ride of London.
The face she dreamed was mine. The voice she heard in that dream was mine. But the lovemaking she dreamed of—remembering now—was nothing that I had shared. I sought to escape her dream, if only to find my own. If I were to be a voyeur, it might as well be in the tumble of manufactured memories which passed for my own dreams.
But I was not allowed to dream my own dreams. Not yet. I suspect that I was born—and born again from my deathbed—simply to dream those dreams of my dead and distant twin.
I resigned myself, ceased my struggles to awaken, and dreamed.
Brawne Lamia comes awake swiftly, jarringly, shaken from a pleasant dream by some sound or movement. For a long second she is disoriented; it is dark, there is a noise—not mechanical—which is louder than most sounds in the Lusus Hive where she lives; she is drunk with fatigue but knows that she has awakened after very little sleep; she is alone in a small, confined space, in something resembling an oversized body bag.