The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (162 page)

Gladstone stood at the forward observation post and watched the carnage. The mob had destroyed most of Deer Park and the formal gardens before the last lines of interdiction and containment fields had stopped them. There were at least three million frenzied people pressed against those barriers now, and the mob grew larger every minute.

“Can you drop the fields back fifty meters and restore them before the mob covers the ground?” Gladstone asked the General. Smoke filled the sky from the cities burning to the west. Thousands of men and women had been smashed against the blur of containment field by the throngs behind them until the lower two meters of the shimmering wall looked as if it had been painted with strawberry jam. Tens of thousands more pressed closer to that inner shield despite the agony of nerve and bone the interdiction field was causing them.

“We can do that, M. Executive,” said Van Zeidt. “But why?”

“I’m going out to talk to them.” Gladstone sounded very tired.

The Marine looked at her, sure that she was making some bad joke. “M. Executive, in a month they will be willing to listen to you … or any of us … on radio or HTV. In a year, maybe two, after order’s restored and rationing’s successful, they might be ready to forgive. But it will be a generation before they really understand what you did … that you saved them … saved us all.”

“I want to talk to them,” said Meina Gladstone. “I have something to give to them.”

Van Zeidt shook his head and looked at the circle of FORCE officers
who had been staring out at the mob through slits in the bunker and who now were staring at Gladstone with equal disbelief and horror.

“I’d have to check with CEO Kolchev,” said General Van Zeidt.

“No,” Meina Gladstone said tiredly. “He rules an empire which no longer exists. I still rule the world I destroyed.” She nodded toward her Praetorians and they produced deathwands from their orange-and-black-striped tunics.

None of the FORCE officers moved. General Van Zeidt said, “Meina, the next evacuation ship will make it.”

Gladstone nodded as if distracted. “The inner garden, I should think. The mob will be at a loss for several moments. The withdrawal of the outer fields will throw them off balance.” She looked around as if she might be forgetting something and then extended her hand to Van Zeidt. “Goodbye, Mark. Thank you. Please take care of my people.”

Van Zeidt shook her hand and watched as the woman adjusted her scarf, absently touched a bracelet comlog as if for luck, and went out of the bunker with four of her Praetorians. The small group crossed the trampled gardens and walked slowly toward the containment fields. The mob beyond seemed to react like a single, mindless organism, pressing through the violet interdiction field and screaming with the voice of some demented thing.

Gladstone turned, raised one hand as if to wave, and gestured her Praetorians back. The four guards hurried across the matted grass.

“Do it,” said the oldest of the remaining Praetorians. He pointed to the containment field control remote.

“Fuck you,” General Van Zeidt said clearly. No one would go near that remote while he lived.

Van Zeidt had forgotten that Gladstone still had access to codes and tactical tightbeam links. He saw her raise her comlog, but he reacted too slowly. Lights on the remote blinked red and then green, the outer fields winked out and then re-formed fifty meters closer in, and for a second, Meina Gladstone stood alone with nothing between her and the mob of millions except a few meters of grass and countless corpses suddenly surrendered to gravity by the retreating shield walls.

Gladstone raised both arms as if embracing the mob. Silence and lack of motion extended for three eternal seconds, and then the mob roared with the voice of a single great beast, and thousands surged forward with sticks and rocks and knives and broken bottles.

For a moment it seemed to Van Zeidt that Gladstone stood like an
impervious rock against that tidal wave of rabble; he could see her dark suit and bright scarf, see her standing upright, her arms still raised, but then more hundreds surged in, the crowd closed, and the CEO was lost.

The Praetorians lowered their weapons and were put under immediate arrest by Marine sentries.

“Opaque the containment fields,” ordered Van Zeidt. “Tell the drop-ships to land in the inner garden at five-minute intervals.
Hurry!
”

The General turned away.

“Good Lord,” said Theo Lane as the fragmented reports kept coming in over the fatline. There were so many millisecond squirts being sent that the computer could do little to separate them. The result was a mélange of madness.

“Play back the destruction of the singularity containment sphere,” said the Consul.

“Yes, sir,” said the ship and interrupted its fatline messages for a replay of the sudden burst of white, followed by a brief blossoming of debris and sudden collapse as the singularity swallowed itself and everything within a six-thousand-klick radius. Instruments showed the effect of gravity tides: easily adjusted for at this distance but playing havoc with the Hegemony and Ouster ships still locked in battle closer to Hyperion.

“All right,” said the Consul, and the rush of fatline reports resumed.

“There’s no doubt?” asked Arundez.

“None,” said the Consul. “Hyperion is an Outback world again. Only this time there is no Web to be Outback to.”

“It’s so hard to believe,” said Theo Lane. The ex-Governor-General sat drinking Scotch: the only time the Consul had ever seen his aide indulge in a drug. Theo poured another four fingers. “The Web … gone. Five hundred years of expansion wiped out.”

“Not wiped out,” said the Consul. He set his own drink, still unfinished, on a table. “The worlds remain. The cultures will grow apart, but we still have the Hawking drive. The one technological advance we gave ourselves rather than leased from the Core.”

Melio Arundez leaned forward, his palms together as if praying. “Can the Core really be gone? Destroyed?”

The Consul listened a moment to the babble of voices, cries, entreaties, military reports, and pleas for help coming over the fatline
voice-only bands. “Perhaps not destroyed,” he said, “but cut off, sealed away.”

Theo finished his drink and carefully set his glass down. His green eyes had a placid, glazed look. “You think there are … other spider-webs for them? Other farcaster systems? Reserve Cores?”

The Consul made a gesture with his hand. “We know they succeeded in creating their Ultimate Intelligence. Perhaps that UI allowed this … winnowing … of the Core. Perhaps it’s keeping some of the old AIs on line—in a reduced capacity—the way they had planned to keep a few billion humans in reserve.”

Suddenly the fatline babble ceased as if cut off by a knife.

“Ship?” queried the Consul, suspecting a power failure somewhere in the receiver!

“All fatline messages have ceased, most in midtransmission,” said the ship.

The Consul felt his heart pounding as he thought
The deathwand device
. But no, he realized at once, that couldn’t affect all of the worlds at once. Even with hundreds of such devices detonating simultaneously, there would be lag time as FORCE ships and other far-flung transmission sources got in their final messages. But what then?

“The messages appear to have been cut off by a disturbance in the transmission medium,” said the ship. “Which is, to my current knowledge, impossible.”

The Consul stood.
A disturbance in the transmission medium?
The fatline medium, as far as humans understood it, was the hyperstring Planck-infinite topography of space-time itself: what AIs had cryptically referred to as the Void Which Binds. There could be no disturbance in that medium.

Suddenly the ship said, “Fatline message coming in—transmission source, everywhere; encryption base, infinite; squirt rate, real-time.”

The Consul opened his mouth to tell the ship to quit spouting nonsense when the air above the holopit misted in something neither image nor data column, and a voice spoke:

“
THERE WILL BE NO FURTHER MISUSE OF THIS CHANNEL, YOU ARE DISTURBING OTHERS WHO ARE USING IT TO SERIOUS PURPOSE. ACCESS WILL BE RESTORED WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS FOR. GOODBYE
.”

The three men sat in silence unbroken except for the reassuring rush of ventilator fans and the myriad soft noises of a ship under way. Finally the Consul said, “Ship, please send out a standard fatline time-location squirt without encoding. Add ‘receiving stations respond.’ ”

There was a pause of seconds—an impossibly long response time for the AI-caliber computer that was the ship. “I’m sorry, that is not possible,” it said at last.

“Why not?” demanded the Consul.

“Fatline transmissions are no longer being … allowed. The hyperstring medium is no longer receptive to modulation.”

“There’s nothing on the fatline?” asked Theo, staring at the empty space above the holopit as if someone had turned off a holie just as it was getting to the exciting part.

Again the ship paused. “To all intents and purposes, M. Lane,” it said, “there is no fatline any longer.”

“Jesus wept,” muttered the Consul. He finished his drink in one long gulp and went to the bar for another. “It’s the old Chinese curse,” he muttered.

Melio Arundez looked up. “What’s that?”

The Consul took a long drink. “Old Chinese curse,” he said. “May you live in interesting times.”

As if compensating for the loss of fatline, the ship played audio of in-system radio and intercepted tightbeam babble while it projected a real-time view of the blue-and-white sphere of Hyperion turning and growing as they decelerated toward it at two hundred gravities.

FORTY-FIVE

I escape the Web datasphere just before escape ceases to be an option.

It is incredible and oddly disturbing, the sight of the megasphere swallowing itself. Brawn Lamia’s view of the megasphere as an organic thing, a semisentient organism more analagous to an ecology than a city, was essentially correct. Now, as the farcaster links cease to be and the world
inside
those avenues folds and collapses upon itself, the external datasphere simultaneously collapsing like a burning big-top tent suddenly without poles, wires, guys, or stakes, the living megasphere devours itself like some ravenous predator gone mad—chewing its own tail, belly, entrails, forepaws, and heart—until only the mindless jaws are left, snapping on emptiness
.

The metasphere remains. But it is more wilderness than ever now.

Black forests of unknown time and space.

Sounds in the night.

Lions.

And tigers.

And bears.

When the Void Which Binds convulses and sends its single, banal message to the human universe, it is as if an earthquake has sent ripples through solid rock. Hurrying through the shifting metasphere above Hyperion, I have to smile. It is as if the God-analog has grown tired of the ants scribbling graffiti on Its big toe.

I don’t see God—either one of them—in the metasphere. I don’t try. I have enough problems of my own.

The black vortexes of the Web and Core entrances are gone now, erased from space and time like warts removed, vanished as thoroughly as whirlpools in water when the storm has passed.

I am stuck here unless I want to brave the metasphere.

Which I do not. Not yet.

But this is where I want to be. The datasphere is all but gone here in Hyperion System, the pitiful remnants on the world itself and in what remains of the FORCE fleet drying up like tidepools in the sun, but the Time Tombs glow through the metasphere like beacons in the gathering darkness. If the farcaster links had been black vortexes, the Tombs blaze like white holes shedding an expanding light.

I move toward them. So far, as the One Who Comes Before, all I have accomplished is to appear in others’ dreams. It is time to
do
something.