The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (182 page)

“You’d better eat,” grumbled the old man. “You don’t know when your next meal will come.”

I stood looking at him. Steam from the coffee rose to warm my face. The air was chill. “If things go according to plan, I’ll be in the spaceship in less than six hours. I’ll eat then.”

Martin Silenus made a rough noise. “When do things ever go according to plan, Raul Endymion?”

I sipped coffee. “Speaking of plans, you were going to tell me about the sort of miracle that’s going to distract the Swiss Guard while I whisk your young friend away.”

The ancient poet peered at me for a silent moment. “Just trust me on that, will you?”

I sighed. I had been afraid he would say that. “That’s a lot to take on trust, old man.”

He nodded but remained silent.

“All right,” I said at last. “We’ll see what happens.” I turned to where A. Bettik was standing near the stairway. “Just don’t forget to be there with the ship when we need you.”

“I will not forget, sir,” said the android.

I walked to where the hawking mat was laid out on the floor. A. Bettik had set my pack on it. “Any last instructions?” I asked, not knowing which person I was speaking to.

The old man floated closer on his hoverchair. He looked ancient in the torchlight: more wizened and mummified than ever. His fingers were like yellowed bones. “Just this,” he rasped. “Listen—

“What?” I said. “I don’t …”

“Fuck it,” rasped the poet. “Just get Aenea, take her to the Ousters, and get her back alive. It’s not too complicated. Even a shepherd should be able to do it.”

“Don’t forget landscape apprentice, bartender, and duck hunter,” I said, and set my cup of coffee down.

“It’s almost three,” said Silenus. “You need to get going.”

I took a breath. “Just one minute,” I said. I clattered down the stairs, went into the lavatory, relieved myself, and leaned against the cool stone wall for a moment.
Are you mad, Raul Endymion?
It was my thought, but I heard it in Grandam’s soft voice.
Yes
, I answered.

I walked back up the stairs, amazed at how shaky my legs were and how rapidly my heart was beating.

“All set,” I said. “Mother always said to take care of these things before leaving home.”

The thousand-year-old poet grunted and hovered his chair
near the hawking mat. I sat on the rug, activated the flight threads, and hovered a meter and a half above the stone floor.

“Remember, once you’re in the Cleft and find the entrance, it’s programmed,” said Silenus.

“I know, you told me all about …”

“Shut up and listen,” he rasped. Ancient parchment fingers pointed to the proper thread designs. “You remember how to fly it. Once in, tap in the sequence there … there … there … and the program will take over. You can interrupt the sequence to fly manually by touching the interrupt design here.…” His fingers caressed air above the ancient threads. “But don’t try to fly it yourself down there. You’ll never find your way out.”

I nodded and licked dry lips. “You didn’t tell me who programmed it. Who did this flight before?”

The satyr showed new teeth. “I did, my boy. It took me months, but I did. Almost two centuries ago.”

“Two centuries!” I almost stepped off the mat. “What if there have been cave-ins? Shiftings due to earthquakes? What if something’s got in the way since then?”

Martin Silenus shrugged. “You’ll be going over two hundred klicks per hour, boy,” he said. “I guess you’ll die.” He slapped me on the back. “Get going. Give my love to Aenea. Tell her that Uncle Martin is waiting to see Old Earth before he dies. Tell her that the old fart is eager to hear her expound the meanings of all motions, shapes, and sounds.”

I raised the hawking mat another half meter.

A. Bettik stepped forward and extended a blue hand. I shook it. “Good luck, M. Endymion.”

I nodded, found nothing else to say, and flew the hawking mat up and out of the tower in rising spirals.

To fly directly from the city of Endymion in the middle of the continent of Aquila to the Valley of the Time Tombs on the continent of Equus, I should have headed almost due north. I headed east.

My test-flying the day before—it was the same day to my tired mind—had shown how easy it was to handle the hawking mat, but that was at speeds of a few klicks per hour. When I was a hundred meters above the tower, I set the direction—the penlight
clamped in my teeth illuminating the inertial compass, lining up the mat along that invisible line, checking it against the topographic map the old poet had given me—and held the palm of my hand on the acceleration pattern. The mat continued to speed up until the gentle containment field activated to shield me from the wind blast. Too late, I glanced back to catch a last glimpse of the tower—perhaps to see the old poet watching from a window—but already the ruined university town was lost to sight in the mountain darkness.

There was no speed indicator, so I had to assume the mat was flying at its top speed as it soared toward the high peaks to the east. Starlight reflected on snowfields higher than my own altitude, so to be cautious, I stowed the penlight, pulled on the night-vision glasses, and continued to check my position against the topo map. As the land rose, so did I, holding the hawking mat at a hundred meters above the boulders, waterfalls, avalanche chutes, and icefalls all glowing green in the enhanced starlight from the night-vision goggles. The mat was perfectly silent in its flight—even the wind noise was hushed by the deflective containment field—and several times I saw large animals leap to hiding, surprised by the sudden appearance of this wingless bird above them. I crossed the continental divide half an hour after leaving the tower, keeping the mat in the center of the five-thousand-meter pass. It was cold there, and though the containment field held some of my own body heat in the traveling bubble of still air, I had long since pulled on my thermal jacket and gloves.

Beyond the mountains, descending quickly to stay close to the rugged terrain, I watched the tundra give way to fenfields, the fenfields to low lines of dwarf everblues and triaspen, and then saw these high-mountain trees trail off and disappear as the glow of the tesla flame forests began to light the east like a false dawn.

I stowed the night-vision glasses in my pack. The sight ahead was beautiful and somewhat frightening—the entire eastern horizon snapping and crackling with electricity, ball lightning leaping between the hundred-meter-tall tesla trees, chain lightning rippling through the air between tesla and exploding prometheus, phoenix shrubs and random ground fires burning in a thousand places. Both Martin Silenus and A. Bettik had warned me about this, and I took the hawking mat high, accepting the
risk of detection at this altitude as preferable to being caught in that electric maelstrom below.

Another hour and there was a hint of sunrise to the east, beyond the flame-forest glow, but just as the sky paled and then deepened into daylight, the flame forests fell behind me and the Cleft came into sight.

I had been aware that I had been climbing for the past forty minutes as I checked my route above the Pinion Plateau on the creased topo map, but now I felt the altitude as the depth of that great crevice in this part of Aquila became visible ahead. In its own way, the Cleft was as frightening as the flame forests—narrow, vertical, dropping three thousand meters in a straight fall from the flatlands above. I crossed the southern edge of the great split in the continent and dived toward the river three kilometers below. The Cleft continued east, the river beneath me roaring along at nearly the same speed as the mat as I slowed. Within moments the morning sky darkened above me and the stars reappeared; it was as if I had fallen into a deep well. The river at the base of these terrifying cliffs of fall was wild, clogged with bergs of its own ice, leaping over boulders the size of the spaceship I had left behind. I stayed five meters above the spray and slowed even further. I must be close.

I checked my chronometer and then the map. It should be somewhere ahead in the next two klicks … there!

It was larger than they had described—at least thirty meters to a side—and perfectly square. The entrance to the planetary labyrinth had been carved in the form of a temple entrance, or a giant door. I slowed the hawking mat further and then banked left, pausing at the entrance. According to my chronometer, it had taken just under ninety minutes to reach the Cleft. The Valley of the Time Tombs was still a thousand klicks north of here. Four hours of flying at high cruising speed. I looked again at my chronometer—four hours and twenty minutes until the time the child was scheduled to step out of the Sphinx.

I edged the hawking mat forward, into the cavern. Trying to remember the details of the Priest’s Tale in the old man’s
Cantos
, I could remember only that it was here—just within the labyrinth entrance—that Father Dure and the Bikura had encountered the Shrike and the cruciforms.

There was no Shrike. I was not surprised—the creature had not been sighted since the Fall of the WorldWeb 274 years ago.
There were no cruciforms. Again, I was not surprised—the Pax had harvested them long ago from these cavern walls.

I knew what everyone knew about the Labyrinth. There had been nine known labyrinthine worlds in the old Hegemony. All of those worlds had been Earth-like—7.9 on the ancient Solmev Scale—except that they were tectonically dead, more Mars-like than Earth-like in that respect. The labyrinth tunnels honeycombed those nine worlds—Hyperion included—and served no known purpose. They had been tunneled tens of thousands of years before humankind had left Old Earth, although no clue to the tunnelers had ever been found. The labyrinths fueled numerous myths—including the
Cantos
—but their mystery remained. The Labyrinth of Hyperion had never been mapped—except for the part I was ready to travel at 270 klicks per hour. It had been mapped by a mad poet. Or so I hoped.

I slipped the night-vision glasses back on as the sunlight faded behind me. I felt the skin on the back of my neck prickle as the darkness closed around. Soon the glasses would be useless, as there would be no light to enhance. Taking tape from my pack, I secured the flashlight laser to the front of the hawking mat and set the beam to its widest dispersal. The light would be faint, but the goggles would amplify it. Already I could see branchings ahead—the cavern remained a great, hollow, rectangular prism, thirty meters on a side, with only the smallest signs of cracks or collapse—and ahead, tunnels branched to the right, then left, then downward.

I took a breath and tapped in the programmed sequence. The hawking mat leaped ahead, accelerating to its preset speed, the sudden lurch making me lean far backward despite the compensating effect of the containment field.

That field would not protect me if the carpet took a wrong turn and smashed into a wall at this speed. Rocks flashed past. The hawking mat banked sharply to make a right turn, leveled itself in the center of the long cavern, then dived to follow a descending branch.

It was terrifying to watch. I took the night-vision glasses off, secured them in my coat pocket, gripped the edge of the leaping, lurching mat, and closed my eyes. I need not have bothered. The darkness was now absolute.

With fifteen minutes until the opening of the Sphinx, Father Captain de Soya paces the valley floor. The storm has long since arrived, and sand fills the air in a rasping blizzard. Hundreds of Swiss Guard are deployed here along the Valley floor, but their armored CTVs, their gun emplacements, their missile batteries, their observation posts—all are invisible due to the dust storm. But de Soya knows that they would be invisible at any rate, concealed behind camouflage fields and chameleon polymer. The father-captain has to rely on his infrared to see anything in this howling storm. And even then, with his visor down and sealed, fine particles of sand make their way down his combat suit collar and up into his mouth. This day tastes of grit. His sweat leaves tiny trails of red mud, like blood from some holy stigmata, on his brow and cheeks.

“Attention,” he says over the all-call channels. “This is Father Captain de Soya, commanding this mission under papal imperative. Commander Barnes-Avne will repeat these orders in a moment, but right now I want to specify that there will be no actions taken, no shots fired, no defensive acts initiated that will in any way endanger the life of the child who will be stepping from one of these tombs in … thirteen and a half minutes. I want this understood by every Pax officer and trooper, every torchship captain and space-navy sailor, every pilot and airborne
flight officer … 
this child must be captured but unharmed
. Failure to heed this warning will result in court-martial and summary execution. May we all serve our Lord and our Church this day.… In the name of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I ask that our efforts be successful. Father Captain de Soya, Acting Commander Hyperion expedition, out.”