The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (140 page)

“Yes,” I say, knowing it is not true.

“Good night,” says Hunt. “No more nightmares, all right?”

“No more,” I say, knowing this is even less true.

Moneta pulled the wounded Kassad away from the Shrike and seemed to hold the creature at bay with an extended hand while she fumbled a blue torus from the belt of her skinsuit and twisted it behind her.

A two-meter-high gold oval hung burning in midair.

“Let me go,” muttered Kassad. “Let us finish it.” There was blood spattered where the Shrike had clawed huge rents in the Colonel’s skinsuit. His right foot was dangling as if half-severed; he could put no weight on it, and only the fact that he had been struggling with the Shrike, half-carried by the thing in a mad parody of a dance, had kept Kassad upright as they fought.

“Let me go,” repeated Fedmahn Kassad.

“Shut up,” said Moneta, and then, more softly, “Shut up, my love.”
She dragged him through the golden oval, and they emerged into blazing light.

Even through his pain and exhaustion, Kassad was dazzled by the sight. They were not on Hyperion; he was sure of that. A vast plain stretched to an horizon much farther away than logic or experience would allow. Low, orange grass—if grass it was—grew on the flatlands and low hills like fuzz on the back of some immense caterpillar, while things which might have been trees grew like whiskered-carbon sculptures, their trunks and branches Escher-ish in their baroque improbability, their leaves a riot of dark blue and violet ovals shimmering toward a sky alive with light.

But not sunlight. Even as Moneta carried him away from the closing portal—Kassad did not think of it as a farcaster since he felt sure it had carried them through time as well as space—and toward a copse of those impossible trees, Kassad turned his eyes toward the sky and felt something close to wonder. It was as bright as a Hyperion day; as bright as midday on a Lusian shopping mall; as bright as midsummer on the Tharsis Plateau of Kassad’s dry homeworld, Mars, but this was no sunlight—the sky was filled with stars and constellations and star clusters and a galaxy so cluttered with suns that there were almost no patches of darkness between the lights. It was like being in a planetarium with ten projectors, thought Kassad. Like being at the center of the galaxy.

The center of the galaxy.

A group of men and women in skinsuits moved out from the shade of the Escher trees to circle Kassad and Moneta. One of the men—a giant even by Kassad’s Martian standards—looked at him, raised his head toward Moneta, and even though Kassad could hear nothing, sense nothing on his skinsuit’s radio and tightband receivers, he knew the two were communicating.

“Lie back,” said Moneta as she laid Kassad on the velvety orange grass. He struggled to sit up, to speak, but both she and the giant touched his chest with their palms, and he lay back so that his vision was filled with the slowly twisting violet leaves and the sky of stars.

The man touched him again, and Kassad’s skinsuit was deactivated. He tried to sit up, tried to cover himself as he realized he was naked before the small crowd that had gathered, but Moneta’s firm hand held him in place. Through the pain and dislocation, he vaguely sensed the man touching his slashed arms and chest, running a silver-coated hand down his leg to where the Achilles tendon had been cut. The Colonel
felt a coolness wherever the giant touched, and then his consciousness floated away like a balloon, high above the tawny plain and the rolling hills, drifting toward the solid canopy of stars where a huge figure waited, dark as a towering thundercloud above the horizon, massive as a mountain.

“Kassad,” whispered Moneta, and the Colonel drifted back. “Kassad,” she said again, her lips against his cheek, his skinsuit reactivated and melded with hers.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad sat up as she did. He shook his head, realized that he was clothed in quicksilver energy once again, and got to his feet. There was no pain. He felt his body tingle in a dozen places where injuries had been healed, serious cuts repaired. He melded his hand to his own suit, ran flesh across flesh, bent his knee and touched his heel, but could feel no scars.

Kassad turned toward the giant. “Thank you,” he said, not knowing if the man could hear.

The giant nodded and stepped back toward the others.

“He’s a … a doctor of sorts,” said Moneta. “A healer.”

Kassad half-heard her as he concentrated on the other people. They were human—he knew in his heart that they were human—but the variety was staggering: their skinsuits were not all silver like Kassad’s and Moneta’s but ranged through a score of colors, each as soft and organic as some living wild creature’s pelt. Only the subtle energy-shimmer and blurred facial features revealed the skinsuit surface. Their anatomy was as varied as their coloration: the healer’s Shrike-sized girth and massive bulk, his massive brow and a cascade of tawny energy flow which might be a mane … a female next to him, no larger than a child but obviously a woman, perfectly proportioned with muscular legs, small breasts, and faery wings two meters long rising from her back—and not merely decorative wings, either, for when the breeze ruffled the orange prairie grass, this woman gave a short run, extended her arms, and rose gracefully into the air.

Behind several tall, thin women with blue skinsuits and long, webbed fingers, a group of short men were as visored and armor-plated as a FORCE Marine going into battle in a vacuum, but Kassad sensed that the armor was part of
them
. Overhead, a cluster of winged males rose on thermals, thin, yellow beams of laser light pulsing between them in some complex code. The lasers seemed to emanate from an eye in each of their chests.

Kassad shook his head again.

“We need to go,” said Moneta. “The Shrike cannot follow us here. These warriors have enough to contend with without dealing with this particular manifestation of the Lord of Pain.”

“Where are we?” asked Kassad.

Moneta brought a violet oval into existence with a golden ferule from her belt. “Far in humankind’s future.
One
of our futures. This is where the Time Tombs were formed and launched backward in time.”

Kassad looked around again. Something very large moved in front of the starfield, blocking out thousands of stars and throwing a shadow for scant seconds before it was gone. The men and women looked up briefly and then went back to their business: harvesting small things from the trees, huddling in clusters to view bright energy maps called up by a flick of one man’s fingers, flying off toward the horizon with the speed of a thrown spear. One low, round individual of indeterminate sex had burrowed into the soft soil and was visible now only as a faint line of raised earth moving in quick concentric circles around the band.

“Where
is
this place?” Kassad asked again. “
What
is it?” Suddenly, inexplicably, he felt himself close to tears, as if he had turned an unfamiliar corner and found himself at home in the Tharsis Relocation Projects, his leg-dead mother waving to him from a doorway, his forgotten friends and siblings waiting for him to join a game of scootball.

“Come,” said Moneta and there was no mistaking the urgency in her voice. She pulled Kassad toward the glowing oval. He watched the others and the dome of stars until he stepped through and the view was lost to sight.

They stepped out into darkness, and it took the briefest of seconds for the filters in Kassad’s skinsuit to compensate his vision. They were at the base of the Crystal Monolith in the Valley of the Time Tombs on Hyperion. It was night. Clouds boiled overhead, and a storm was raging. Only a pulsing glow from the Tombs themselves illuminated the scene. Kassad felt a sick lurch of loss for the clean, well-lighted place they had just left, and then his mind focused on what he was seeing.

Sol Weintraub and Brawne Lamia were half a klick down the valley, Sol bending over the woman as she lay near the front of the Jade Tomb. Wind swirled dust around them so thickly that they did not see the Shrike moving like another shadow down the trail past the Obelisk, toward them.

Fedmahn Kassad stepped off the dark marble in front of the Monolith and skirted the shattered crystal shards which littered the path. He realized that Moneta still clung to his arm.

“If you fight again,” she said, her voice soft and urgent in his ear, “the Shrike will kill you.”

“They’re my friends,” said Kassad. His FORCE gear and torn armor lay where Moneta had thrown it hours earlier. He searched the Monolith until he found his assault rifle and a bandolier of grenades, saw the rifle was still functional, checked charges and clicked off safeties, left the Monolith, and stepped forward at double time to intercept the Shrike.

I wake to the sound of water flowing, and for a second I believe I am awakening from my nap near the waterfall of Lodore during my walking tour with Brown. But the darkness when I open my eyes is as fearsome as when I slept, the water has a sick, trickling sound rather than the rush of the cataract which Southey would someday make famous in his poem, and I feel terrible—not merely sick with the sore throat I came down with on our tour after Brown and I foolishly climbed Skiddaw before breakfast—but mortally, fearfully ill, with my body aching with something deeper than ague while phlegm and fire bubble in my chest and belly.

I rise and feel my way to the window by touch. A dim light comes under the door from Leigh Hunt’s room, and I realize that he has gone to sleep with the lamp still lit. That would not have been a bad thing for me to have done, but it is too late to light it now as I feel my way to the lighter rectangle of outer darkness set into the deeper darkness of the room.

The air is fresh and filled with the scent of rain. I realize that the sound that woke me is thunder as lightning flashes over the rooftops of Rome. No lights burn in the city. By leaning slightly out of the open window, I can see the stairs above the Piazza all slick with rain and the towers of Trinità dei Monti outlined blackly against lightning flashes. The wind that blows down those steps is chill, and I move back to the bed to pull a blanket around me before dragging a chair to the window and sitting there, looking out, thinking.

I remember my brother Tom during those last weeks and days, his face and body contorted with the terrible effort to breathe. I remember my mother and how pale she looked, her face almost shining in the
gloom of the darkened room. My sister and I were allowed to touch her clammy hand, kiss her fevered lips, and then withdraw. I remember that once I furtively wiped my lips as I left that room, glancing sideways to see if my sister or others had seen my sinful act.

When Dr. Clark and an Italian surgeon opened Keats’s body less than thirty hours after he had died, they found, as Severn later wrote a friend, “… the worst possible Consumption—the lungs were intirely destroyed—the cells were quite gone.” Neither Dr. Clark nor the Italian surgeon could imagine how Keats had lived those last two months or more.

I think of this as I sit in the darkened room and look out on the darkened Piazza, all the while listening to the boiling in my chest and throat, feeling the pain like fire inside and the worse pain from the cries in my mind: cries from Martin Silenus on the tree, suffering for writing the poetry I had been too frail and cowardly to finish; cries from Fedmahn Kassad as he prepares to die at the claws of the Shrike; cries from the Consul as he is forced into betrayal a second time; cries from thousands of Templar throats as they bewail the death of both their world and their brother Het Masteen; cries from Brawne Lamia as she thinks of her dead lover, my twin; cries from Paul Duré as he lies fighting burns and the shock of memory, all too aware of the waiting cruciforms on his chest; cries from Sol Weintraub as he beats his fist on the earth of Hyperion, calling for his child, the infant cries of Rachel still in our ears.

“Goddamn,” I say softly, beating my fist against the stone and mortar of the window frame. “Goddamn.”

After a while, just as the first hint of paleness promises dawn, I move away from the window, find my bed, and lie down just a moment to close my eyes.

Governor-General Theo Lane awoke to the sound of music. He blinked and looked around, recognizing the nearby nutrient tank and ship’s surgery as if from a dream. Theo realized that he was wearing soft, black pajamas and had been sleeping on the surgery’s examination couch. The past twelve hours began to stitch themselves together from Theo’s patches of memory: being raised from the treatment tank, sensors being applied, the Consul and another man leaning over him, asking him questions—Theo answering just as if he were truly conscious, then sleep again, dreams of Hyperion and its cities burning. No, not dreams.

Theo sat up, felt himself almost float off the couch, found his clothes cleaned and folded neatly on a nearby shelf, and dressed quickly, hearing the music continue, now rising, now fading, but always continuing with a haunting acoustical quality which suggested that it was live and not recorded.

Theo took the short stairway to the recreation deck and stopped in surprise as he realized that the ship was open, the balcony extended, the containment field apparently off. Gravity underfoot was minimal: enough to pull Theo back to the deck but little more—probably 20 percent or less of Hyperion’s, perhaps one-sixth standard.

The ship was open. Brilliant sunlight streamed in the open door to the balcony where the Consul sat playing the antique instrument he had called a piano. Theo recognized the archaeologist, Arundez, leaning against the hull opening with a drink in his hand. The Consul was playing something very old and very complicated; his hands were a studied blur on the keyboard. Theo moved closer, started to whisper something to the smiling Arundez, and then stopped in shock to stare.

Beyond the balcony, thirty meters below, brilliant sunlight fell on a bright green lawn stretching to an horizon far too close. On that lawn, clusters of people sat and lay in relaxed postures, obviously listening to the Consul’s impromptu concert. But what people!

Theo could see tall, thin people, looking like the aesthetes of Epsilon Eridani, pale and bald in their wispy blue robes, but beside them and beyond them an amazing multitude of human types sat listening—more varieties than the Web had ever seen: humans cloaked in fur and scales; humans with bodies like bees and eyes to match, multifaceted receptors and antennae; humans as fragile and thin as wire sculptures, great black wings extending from their thin shoulders and folding around them like capes; humans apparently designed for massive-g worlds, short and stout and muscular as cape buffalo, making Lusians look fragile in comparison; humans with short bodies and long arms covered with orange fur, only their pale and sensitive faces separating them from some holo of Old Earth’s long-extinct orangutans; and other humans looking more lemur than humanoid, more aquiline or leonine or ursine or anthropoid than manlike. Yet somehow Theo knew at once that these were
human beings
, as shocking as their differences were. Their attentive gazes, their relaxed postures, and a hundred other subtle human attributes—down to the way a butterfly-winged mother cradled a butterfly-winged child in her arms—all gave testimony to a common humanity which Theo could not deny.