The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (266 page)

Aenea nodded.

I was close to panting, feeling as if I had run a fifty-meter dash. “So?” I said lamely, unclenching my fist.

Aenea touched my knee. As contact with her always did, I felt a thrill of electric shock run through me. “Raul, I didn’t say that the Core hadn’t been up to no good. I simply said that Uncle Martin had made a mistake in portraying them as humanity’s enemy.”

“But if all those facts are true …” I shook my head, befuddled.

“
Elements
of the Core attacked the Web before the Fall,” said Aenea. “We know from my father’s visit with Ummon that the Core was not in agreement about many of its decisions.”

“But …” I began.

Aenea held her hand up, palm out. I fell silent.

“They used our neural networks for their UI project,” she said, “but there’s no evidence that it did humans any harm.”

My jaw almost dropped open at that comment. The thought of those damned AIs using human brains like neural bubbles in their fucking project made me want to throw up. “They had no right!” I began.

“Of course not,” said Aenea. “They should have asked permission. What would you have said?”

“I would have told them to go fuck themselves,” I said, realizing the absurdity of the phrase as applied to autonomous intelligences even as I uttered it.

Aenea smiled again. “And you might remember that we’ve been using
their
mental power for our own purposes for more than a thousand years. I don’t think that we asked permission of their ancestors when we created the first silicon AIs … or the first magnetic bubble and DNA entities, for that matter.”

I made an angry gesture. “That’s different.”

“Of course,” said Aenea. “The group of AIs called the Ultimates have created problems for humanity in the past and will in the future—including trying to kill you and me—but they’re only one part of the Core.”

I shook my head. “I don’t understand, kiddo,” I said, my voice softer now. “Are you really saying that there are good AIs and bad AIs? Don’t you remember that they actually considered
destroying the human race
? And that they may do it yet if we get in their way? That would make them an enemy of humanity in my book.”

Aenea touched my knee again. Her dark eyes were serious. “Don’t forget, Raul, that humanity has also come close to destroying the human race. Capitalists and communists were ready to blow up Earth when that was the only planet we lived on. And for what?”

“Yeah,” I said lamely, “but …”

“And the Church is ready to destroy the Ousters even as we speak. Genocide … on a scale our race has never seen before.”

“The Church … and a lot of others … don’t consider the Ousters human beings,” I said.

“Nonsense,” snapped Aenea. “Of course they are. They evolved from common Earth-human origins, just as the AI TechnoCore did. All three races are orphans in the storm.”

“All three races …” I repeated. “Jesus Christ, Aenea, are you including the Core in your definition of humanity?”

“We created them,” she said softly. “Early on, we used human DNA to increase their computing power … their intelligence. We used to have robots. They created cybrids out of human DNA and AI personae. Right now, we have a human institution in power which gives all glory and demands all power because of its allegiance to and connection with
God … the human Ultimate Intelligence. Perhaps the Core has a similar situation with the Ultimates in control.”

I could only stare at the girl. I did not understand.

Aenea set her other hand on my knee. I could feel her strong fingers through the whipcord of my trousers. “Raul, do you remember what the AI Ummon said to the second Keats cybrid? That was recorded accurately in the
Cantos
. Ummon talked in sort-of Zen koans … or at least that’s the way Uncle Martin translated the conversation.”

I closed my eyes to remember that part of the epic poem. It had been a long time since Grandam and I took turns reciting the tale around the caravan campfire.

Aenea spoke the words even as they began to form in my memory. “Ummon said to the second Keats cybrid—

I rubbed my cheek and thought. The night wind stirred the canvas folds of Aenea’s shelter entrance and brought sweet scents from the desert. Strange stars hung above Earth’s old mountains on the horizon.

“Empathy was supposedly the fleeing component of the human UI,” I said slowly as if working out a word puzzle. “Part
of our evolved human consciousness in the future, come back in time.”

Aenea looked at me.

“The hybrid was the John Keats cybrid,” I continued. “Son of Man and Machine.”

“No,” said Aenea softly. “That was Uncle Martin’s second misunderstanding. The Keats cybrids were not created to be the refuge for Empathy in this age. They were created to be the instrument of that fusion between the Core and humankind. To have a child, in other words.”

I looked at the teenaged girl’s hands on my leg. “So you’re the consciousness ‘… as near divine as humankind has offered in thirty generations’?”

Aenea shrugged.

“And you have ‘… an imagination which can span space and time’?”

“All human beings have that,” said Aenea. “It’s just that when I dream and imagine, I can see things that truly will be. Remember when I told you that I remember the future?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, right now I’m remembering that you will dream this conversation some months hence, while you’re lying in bed—in terrible pain, I’m afraid—on a world with a complicated name, in a home where people dress all in blue.”

“What?”

“Never mind. It will make sense when it comes about. All improbabilities do when probability waves collapse into event.”

“Aenea,” I heard myself say as I flew in ever higher circles above the desert shelter, watching myself and the girl dwindle below, “tell me what your secret is … the secret that makes you this messiah, this ‘bond between two worlds.’ ”

“All right, Raul, my love,” she said, suddenly appearing as a grown woman in the instant before I circled too high to make out details or hear distinct words above the rush of the air on my dream wings, “I will tell you. Listen.”

By the time they translated into their fifth Ouster system, Task Force GIDEON had slaughter down to a science.

Father Captain de Soya knew from his courses in military history at Pax Fleet Command School that almost all space engagements fought more than half an AU from a planet, moon, asteroid, or strategic point-source in space were entered into by mutual agreement. He remembered that the same had been true of primitive ocean navies on pre-Hegira Old Earth, where most great naval battles had been fought in sight of land in the same aquatic killing grounds, with only the technology of the surface ships changing slowly—Greek trireme to steel-hulled battleship. Aircraft carriers with their long-range attack planes had changed that forever—allowing armadas to strike at each other far out to sea and at great distances—but these battles were far different from the legendary naval engagements where capital ships had slugged it out within visible range of one another. Even before cruise missiles, tactical nuclear warheads, and crude charged particle weapons had forever ended the era of the ocean-going surface combatant, the sea navies of Old Earth had grown nostalgic for the days of blazing broadsides and “crossing the T.”

Space war had brought a return to such mutually agreed upon engagements. The great battles of the Hegemony days—whether
the ancient internecine wars with General Horace Glennon-Height and his ilk, or the centuries of warfare between Web worlds and Ouster Swarms—had usually been waged close to a planet or spaceborne farcaster portal. And distances between the combatants were absurdly short—hundreds of thousands of klicks, often tens of thousands, frequently less than that—given the light-years and parsecs traveled by the warring parties. But this closing on the enemy was necessary given the time it took a fusion-powered laser lance, a CPB, or ordinary attack missiles to cross even one AU—seven minutes for light to crawl the distance between would-be killer and target, much longer for even the highest-boost missile, where the hunt, chase, and kill could take days of seek and countermeasure, attack and parry. Ships with C-plus capability had no incentive to hang around in enemy space waiting for these seeker missiles, and the Church-sponsored restriction on AIs in warheads made the effectiveness of these weapons problematic at best. So the shape of space battles over the centuries of the Hegemony had been simple—fleets translating into disputed space and finding other translating fleets or more static in-system defenses, a quick closing to more lethal distances, a brief but terrible exchange of energies, and the inevitable retreat of the more savaged forces—or total destruction if the defending forces had nowhere to retreat—followed by consolidation of gains by the winning fleet.

Technically, the slower ships de Soya had served in previously had a powerful tactical advantage over the instantaneous-drive archangel cruisers. Revival from cryogenic fugue state took only hours at worst, minutes at best, so the captain and crew of a Hawking-drive ship could be ready to fight shortly after translating from C-plus. With the archangels, and even with papal dispensation for the accelerated and risky two-day resurrection cycles, it was fifty standard hours or more before the human elements of the ships were ready to do battle. Theoretically, this gave a great advantage to the defenders. Theoretically, the Pax could have optimized the use of Gideon-drive ships by having uncrewed craft piloted by AIs flick into enemy space, wreak havoc, and flick out again before the defenders knew that they were under attack.

But such theory did not apply here. Autonomous intelligences capable of such advanced fuzzy logic would never be allowed by the Church. More importantly, Pax Fleet had designed attack strategies to meet the requirements of resurrection so that no advantage would be surrendered to defenders. Simply
put, no battles were to be fought by mutual agreement. The seven archangels had been designed to descend upon the enemy like the mailed fist of God, and that was precisely what they were doing now.

In the first three Task Force GIDEON incursions into Ouster space, Mother Captain Stone’s ship, the
Gabriel
, translated first and decelerated hard in-system, drawing all long-range electro-magnetic, neutrino, and other sensor probes. The restricted AIs aboard
Gabriel
were sufficient to catalogue the position and identity of all defensive positions and population centers in the system, while simultaneously monitoring the sluggish in-system movement of all Ouster attack and merchant vehicles.

Thirty minutes later, the
Uriel, Raphael, Remiel, Sariel, Michael
, and
Raguel
would translate in-system. Dropping to only three-quarters light-speed, the task force would be moving like bullets compared to the tortoise velocities of the accelerating Ouster torchships. Receiving
Gabriel
’s intelligence and targeting data via tightbeam burst, the task force would open fire with weaponry that held no respect for the limitations of light-speed. The improved Hawking-drive hyper-k missiles would wink into existence among enemy ships and above population centers, some using velocity and precise aiming to destroy targets, others detonating in carefully shaped but promiscuous plasma or thermonuclear blasts. At the same instant, recoverable Hawking-drive high-velocity probes would jump to target points and translate into real space, radiating conventional lance beams and CPBs like so many lethal sea urchins, destroying anything and everything within a hundred-thousand-klick radius.

Most terribly, the shipborne deathbeams would slice outward from the task force archangels like invisible scythes, propagating along the Hawking-drive wakes of probes and missiles and translating into real space as surely as the terrible swift sword of God. Countless trillions of synapses were fried and scrambled in an instant. Tens of thousands of Ousters died without knowing that they were under attack.

And then the GIDEON Task Force would come back in-system on thousand-kilometer tails of flame, closing in for the final kill.

Each of the seven star systems to be attacked had been probed by instantaneous-drive drones, the presence
of Ousters confirmed, preliminary targets assigned. Each of the seven star systems had a name—usually just a New Revised General Catalogue alpha-numerical designation—but the command team aboard H. H. S.
Uriel
had given the seven systems target names coded after the seven archdemons mentioned in the Old Testament.

Father Captain de Soya thought it a bit much, all this cabalistic numerology—seven archangels, seven target systems, seven archdemons, seven deadly sins. But he soon fell into the habit of talking about the targets in this shorthand.

The target systems were—Belphegor (sloth), Leviathan (envy), Beelzebub (gluttony), Satan (anger), Asmodeus (lechery), Mammon (avarice), and Lucifer (pride).

Belphegor had been a red-dwarf system that reminded de Soya of Barnard’s Star system, but instead of the lovely, fully terraformed Barnard’s World floating close to the sun, Belphegor’s only planet was a gas giant resembling Barnard’s Star’s forgotten child, Whirl. There were true military targets around this unnamed gas giant: refueling stations for the Ouster Swarm torchships en route to attack the Pax’s Great Wall, gigantic dipships that shuttled the gases from the world to orbit, repair docks and orbital shipyards by the dozen. De Soya had
Raphael
attack these without hesitation, slagging them to orbital lava.