The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (218 page)

“Not quite,” I said, leaning back into the pillows. “He also wanted me to keep the Shrike from hurting you or destroying humanity.”

She nodded. “Is that it?”

I rubbed my sweaty forehead with my good left hand. “I think so. At least that’s all I remember. I was drunk, as I said.” I looked at the child. “How am I doing with the list?”

Aenea made that casting-away gesture with her slender hands. “Not bad. You have to remember that we’ve only been at this a few standard months … less than three, actually.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking out the window at the low shafts of sunlight striking the tall adobe building across from the hospital. Beyond the city, I could see the rocky hills burning red with evening light. “Yeah,” I said again, all of the energy and amusement drained from my voice, “I’m doing great.” I sighed and pushed the dinner tray farther away. “One thing I don’t understand—even in all that confusion, I don’t know why their radar didn’t track the raft when we were so close.”

“A. Bettik shot it out,” said the girl, working on the green gelatin again.

“Say what?”

“A. Bettik shot it out. The radar dish. With your plasma rifle.” She finished the green goop and set the spoon in place. During the last week she had been nurse, doctor, chef, and bottle washer.

“I thought he said he could not shoot at humans,” I said.

“He can’t,” said Aenea, clearing the tray and setting it on a nearby dresser. “I asked him. But he said that there was no prohibition against his shooting as many radar dishes as he
wanted. So he did. Before we fixed your position and dived in to save you.”

“That was a three- or four-klick shot,” I said, “from a pitching raft. How many pulse bolts did he use?”

“One,” said Aenea. She was looking at the monitor readouts above my head.

I whistled softly. “I hope he never gets mad at me. Even from a distance.”

“I think you’d have to be a radar dish before you’d have to worry,” she said, tucking in the clean sheets.

“Where is he?”

Aenea walked to the window and pointed east. “He found an EMV that had a full charge and was checking out the kibbutzim way out toward the Great Salt Sea.”

“All the others have been empty?”

“Every one. Not even a dog, cat, horse, or pet chipmunk left behind.”

I knew that she was not kidding. We had talked about it—when communities are evacuated in a hurry, or when disaster strikes, pets are often left behind. Packs of wild dogs had been a problem during the South Talon uprising on Aquila. The Home Guard had to shoot former pets on sight.

“That means they had time to take their pets with them,” I said.

Aenea turned toward me and crossed her thin arms. “And leave their clothes behind? And their computers, comlogs, private diaries, family holos … all their personal junk?”

“And none of those tell you what happened? No final diary entries? No surveillance cameras or frenzied last-minute comlog entries?”

“Nope,” said the girl. “At first I was reluctant to intrude into their private comlogs and such. But by now I’ve played back dozens of them. During the last week there was the usual news of the fighting nearby. The Great Wall was less than a light-year away and the Pax ships were filling the system. They didn’t come down to the planet much, but it was obvious that Hebron would have to join the Pax Protectorate after it was all over. Then there were some final newscasts about the Ousters breaking through the lines … then nothing. Our guess is that the Pax evacuated the entire population and then the Ousters moved on, but there’s no notice of evacuation in the news holos, or in the computer entries, or anywhere. It’s like the people just
disappeared.” She rubbed her arms. “I have some of the holocast disks if you want to see them.”

“Maybe later,” I said. I was very tired.

“A. Bettik will be back in the morning,” she said, pulling the thin blanket up to my chin. Beyond the window, the sun had set but the hills literally glowed from stored-up light. It was a twilight effect of the stones on this world that I thought I would never tire of watching. But right then, I could not keep my eyes open.

“Do you have the shotgun?” I mumbled. “The plasma rifle? Bettik gone … all alone here …”

“They’re on the raft,” said Aenea. “Now, go to sleep.”

On the first day I was fully conscious, I tried to thank both of them for saving my life. They resisted.

“How did you find me?” I asked.

“It wasn’t hard,” said the girl. “You left the mike open right up to the time the Pax officer stabbed it and broke it. We could hear everything. And we could see you through the binoculars.”

“You shouldn’t have both left the raft,” I said. “It was too dangerous.”

“Not really, M. Endymion,” said A. Bettik. “Besides rigging the sea anchor, which slowed the raft’s progress considerably, M. Aenea had the idea of tying one of the climbing ropes to a small log for flotation and allowing the line to trail behind the raft for almost a hundred meters. If we could not catch up to the raft, we felt certain we could get you back to the trailing line before it moved out of reach. And, as events showed, we did.”

I shook my head. “It was still stupid.”

“You’re welcome,” said the girl.

On the tenth day i tried standing. it was a short-lived victory, but a victory nonetheless. On the twelfth day I walked the length of the corridor to the toilet there. That was a major victory. On the thirteenth day, the power failed all over the city.

Emergency generators in the hospital basement kicked in, but we knew our time there was limited.

•     •     •

“I wish we could take the autosurgeon with us,” I said as we sat on the ninth-floor terrace that last evening, looking down on the shadowed avenues.

“It would fit on the raft,” said A. Bettik, “but the extension cord would be a problem.”

“Seriously,” I said, trying not to sound like the paranoid, victimized, demoralized patient that I was then, “we need to check the pharmacies here for stuff we need.”

“Done,” said Aenea. “Three new and improved medpaks. One whole pouch of plasma ampules. A portable diagnosticator. Ultramorph … but don’t ask, you aren’t getting any today.”

I held out my left hand. “See this? It just stopped shaking this afternoon. I won’t be asking for any again soon.”

Aenea nodded. Overhead, feathery clouds glowed with the last evening light.

“How long do you think these generators will hold out?” I said to the android. The hospital was one of only a handful of city buildings still lighted.

“A few weeks, perhaps,” said A. Bettik. “The power grid has been repairing and running itself for months, but the planet is harsh—you’ve noticed the dust storms that sweep in from the desert each morning—and even though the technology is quite advanced for a non-Pax world, the place needs humans to maintain it.”

“Entropy is a bitch,” I said.

“Now, now,” said Aenea from where she was leaning on the terrace wall. “Entropy can be our friend.”

“When?” I said.

She turned around so that she was leaning back on her elbows. The building behind her was a dark rectangle, serving to highlight the glow of her sunburned skin. “It wears down empires,” she said. “And does in despotisms.”

“That’s a hard phrase to say quickly,” I said. “What despotisms are we talking about here?”

Aenea made that casting-away gesture, and for a minute I thought she was not going to speak, but then she said, “The Huns, the Scythians, the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, the Egyptians, Macedonians, Romans, and Assyrians.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but …”

“The Avars and the Northern Wei,” she continued, “and the Juan-Juans, the Mamelukes, the Persians, Arabs, Abbasids, and Seljuks.”

“Okay,” I said, “but I don’t see …”

“The Kurds and Ghaznavids,” she continued, smiling now. “Not to mention the Mongols, Sui, Tang, Buminids, Crusaders, Cossacks, Prussians, Nazis, Soviets, Japanese, Javanese, North Ammers, Greater Chinese, Colum-Peros, and Antarctic Nationalists.”

I held up a hand. She stopped. Looking at A. Bettik, I said, “I don’t even know these planets, do you?”

The android’s expression was neutral. “I believe they all relate to Old Earth, M. Endymion.”

“No shit,” I said.

“No shit, is, I believe, correct in this context,” A. Bettik said in a flat tone.

I looked back at the girl. “So this is our plan to topple the Pax for the old poet? Hide out somewhere and wait for entropy to take its toll?”

She crossed her arms again. “Uh-uh,” she said. “Normally that would have been a good plan—just hunker down for a few millennia and let time take its course—but these damn cruciforms complicate the equation.”

“How do you mean?” I said, my voice serious.

“Even if we wanted to topple the Pax,” she said, “which—by the way—I don’t. That’s your job. But even if we wanted to, entropy’s not on our side anymore with that parasite that can make people almost immortal.”

“Almost immortal,” I murmured. “When I was dying, I must admit that I thought of the cruciform. It would have been a lot easier … not to mention less painful than all the surgery and recovery … just to die and let the thing resurrect me.”

Aenea was looking at me. Finally she said, “That’s why this planet had the best medical care in or out of the Pax.”

“Why?” I said. My head was still thick with drugs and fatigue.

“They were … are … Jews,” the girl said softly. “Very few accepted the cross. They only had one chance at life.”

We sat for some time without speaking that evening, as the shadows filled the city canyons of New Jerusalem and the hospital hummed with electric life while it still could.

•     •     •

The next morning I walked as far as the old groundcar that had hauled me to the hospital thirteen days earlier, but—sitting in the back where they had made a mattress bed for me—I gave orders to find a gun shop.

After an hour of driving around, it became obvious that there were no gun shops in New Jerusalem. “All right,” I said. “A police headquarters.”

There were several of these. As I hobbled into the first one we encountered, waving away offers from both girl and android to act as a crutch, I soon discovered how underarmed a peaceful society could be. There were no weapons racks there, not even riot guns or stunners. “I don’t suppose Hebron had an army or Home Guard?” I said.

“I believe not,” replied A. Bettik. “Until the Ouster incursion three standard years ago, there were no human enemies or dangerous animals on the planet.”

I grunted and kept looking. Finally, after breaking open a triple-locked drawer in the bottom of some police chief’s desk, I found something.

“A Steiner-Ginn, I believe,” said the android. “A pistol firing reduced-charge plasma bolts.”

“I know what it is,” I said. There were two magazines in the drawer. That should be about sixty bolts. I went outside, aimed the weapon at a distant hillside, and squeezed the trigger ring. The pistol coughed and the hillside showed a tiny flash. “Good,” I said, fitting the old weapon in my empty holster. I was afraid that it would be a signature weapon—capable of being fired only by its owner. Those weapons went in and out of vogue over the centuries.

“We have the flechette pistol on the raft,” began A. Bettik.

I shook my head. I wanted nothing to do with those things for a good while.

A. Bettik and Aenea had stocked up on water and food while I had been recuperating, and by the time I hobbled to the landing at the canal and looked at our refitted and refurbished raft, I could see the extra boxes. “Question,” I said. “Why are we going on with this floating woodpile when there are comfortable little runabout boats tied up over there? Or we could take an EMV and travel in air-conditioned comfort.”

The girl and the blue-skinned man exchanged glances. “We voted while you were recovering,” she said. “We go on with the raft.”

“Don’t I get a vote?” I snapped. I had meant to feign anger, but when it came, it was real enough.

“Sure,” said the girl, standing on the dock with her feet planted, legs apart, and her hands on her hips. “Vote.”

“I vote we get an EMV and travel in comfort,” I said, hearing the petulant tone in my voice and hating it even while continuing it. “Or even one of these boats. I vote we leave these logs behind.”

“Vote recorded,” said the girl. “A. Bettik and I voted to keep the raft. It’s not going to run out of power, and it can float. One of these boats would have shown up on the radar on Mare Infinitus, and an EMV couldn’t have made the trip on some worlds. Two for keeping the raft, one against. We keep it.”

“Who made this a democracy?” I demanded. I admit that I had images of spanking this kid.

“Who made it anything else?” said the girl.

All through this A. Bettik stood by the edge of the dock, fiddling with a rope, his face a study in that embarrassed expression that most people get when around members of another family squabbling. He was wearing a loose tunic and baggy shorts made of yellow linen. There was a wide-brimmed yellow hat on his head.

Aenea stepped onto the raft and loosened the stern line. “You want a boat or an EMV … or a floating couch, for that matter … you take it, Raul. A. Bettik and I are going on in this.”

I started hobbling toward a nice little dinghy tied up along the dock. “Wait,” I said, pivoting on my stronger leg to look at her again. “The farcaster won’t work if I try to go through alone.”

“Right,” said the girl. A. Bettik had stepped aboard the raft, and now she cast off the forward line. The canal was much wider here than it had been in the concrete trough of the aqueduct: about thirty meters across as it ran through New Jerusalem.

A. Bettik stood at the steering oar and looked at me as the girl picked up one of the longer poles and pushed the raft away from the dock.

“Wait!” I said. “Goddammit, wait!” I hobbled down the
pier, jumped the meter or so to the raft, landed on my recuperating leg, and had to catch myself with my good arm before I rolled into the microtent.

Aenea offered me her hand, but I ignored it as I got to my feet. “God, you’re a stubborn brat,” I said.

“Look who’s talking,” said the girl, and went forward to sit at the front of the raft as we moved into the center current.