The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (44 page)

“Do you mean
known
what we must do? A year. A little more. Just after her fifth birthday.”

“A year! Why haven’t you said something?”

“I was waiting for you. To realize. To
know.
”

Sol shook his head. The room seemed far away and slightly tilted. “No. I mean, it doesn’t seem … I have to
think
, Mother.” Sol watched as the strange hand patted Sarai’s familiar hand.

She nodded.

   Sol spent three days and nights in the arid mountains, eating only the thick-crusted bread he had brought and drinking from his condenser therm.

Ten thousand times in the past twenty years he had wished that
he
could take Rachel’s illness; that if anyone had to suffer it should be the father, not the child Any parent would feel that way—
did
feel that way every time his child lay injured or racked with fever. Surely it could not be that simple.

In the heat of the third afternoon, as he lay half dozing in the shade of a thin tablet of rock, Sol learned that it was
not
that simple.

As if in answer, Sol had the fever-vision of naked adults filing toward the ovens past armed men, mothers hiding their children under piles of coats. He saw men and women with flesh hanging in burned strips carrying the dazed children from the ashes of what once had been a city. Sol knew that these images were no dreams, were the very stuff of the First and Second Holocausts, and in his understanding knew before the voice spoke in his mind what the answer was. What it must be.

Silence answered him. Sol stood in the full glare of the sun, almost fell. A black bird wheeled overhead or in his vision. Sol shook his fist at the gunmetal sky.

The earth tilted and Sol fell on his side against sharp rocks. He thought that it was not unlike leaning against a rough wall. A rock the size of his fist burned his cheek.

There was no answer. The ground and sky quit spinning. After a while Sol rose shakily, rubbed the blood and grit from his cheek, and walked down to the town in the valley below.

* * *

“No,” Sol told Sarai, “we will not go to Hyperion. It is not the correct solution.”

“You would have us do nothing then.” Sarai’s lips were white with anger but her voice was firmly in control.

“No. I would have us not do the
wrong
thing.”

Sarai expelled her breath in a hiss. She waved toward the window where their four-year-old was visible playing with her toy horses in the backyard. “Do you think
she
has time for us to do the wrong thing … or anything … indefinitely?”

“Sit down, Mother.”

Sarai remained standing. There was the faintest sprinkling of spilled sugar on the front of her tan cotton dress. Sol remembered the young woman rising nude from the phosphorescent wake of the motile isle on Maui-Covenant.

“We have to do something,” she said.

“We’ve seen over a hundred medical and scientific experts. She’s been tested, prodded, probed, and tortured by two dozen research centers. I’ve been to the Shrike Church on every world in this Web; they won’t see me. Melio and the other Hyperion experts at Reichs say that the Shrike Cult has nothing like the Merlin sickness in their doctrine and the indigenies on Hyperion have no legends of the malady or clues to its cure. Research during the three years the team was on Hyperion showed nothing. Now research there is illegal. Access to the Time Tombs is granted only to the so-called pilgrims. Even getting a travel visa to Hyperion is becoming almost impossible. And if we take Rachel, the trip may kill her.”

Sol paused for breath, touched Sarai’s arm again. “I’m sorry to repeat all this, Mother. But we have done something.”

“Not enough,” said Sarai. “What if we go as pilgrims?”

Sol folded his arms in frustration. “The Church of the Shrike chooses its sacrificial victims from thousands of volunteers. The Web is full of stupid, depressed people. Few of these return.”

“Doesn’t that prove something?” Sarai whispered quickly, urgently. “Somebody or something is preying on these people.”

“Bandits,” said Sol.

Sarai shook her head. “The golem.”

“You mean the Shrike.”

“It’s the golem,” insisted Sarai. “The same one we see in the dream.”

Sol was uneasy. “I don’t see a golem in the dream. What golem?”

“The red eyes that watch,” said Sarai. “It’s the same golem that Rachel heard that night in the Sphinx.”

“How do you know that she heard anything?”

“It’s in the
dream
,” said Sarai. “Before we enter the place where the golem waits.”

“We haven’t dreamed the same dream,” said Sol. “Mother, Mother … why haven’t you told me this before?”

“I thought I was going mad,” whispered Sarai.

Sol thought of his secret conversations with God and put his arm around his wife.

“Oh, Sol,” she whispered against him, “it hurts so much to watch. And it’s so lonely here.”

Sol held her. They had tried to go home—home would always be Barnard’s World—half a dozen times to visit family and friends, but each time the visits were ruined by an invasion of newsteeps and tourists. It was no one’s fault. News traveled almost instantaneously through the megadatasphere of a hundred and sixty Web worlds. To scratch the curiosity itch one had only to pass a universal card across a terminex diskey and step through a farcaster. They had tried arriving unannounced and traveling incognito but they were not spies and the efforts were pitiful. Within twenty-four standard hours of their reentry to the Web, they were besieged. Research institutes and large med centers easily provided the security screen for such a visit, but friends and family suffered. Rachel was
NEWS
.

“Perhaps we could invite Tetha and Richard again …” began Sarai.

“I have a better idea,” said Sol. “Go yourself, Mother. You want to see your sister but you also want to see, hear, and
smell
home … watch a sunset where there are no iguanas … walk in the fields. Go.”

“Go? Just me? I couldn’t be away from Rachel …”

“Nonsense,” said Sol. “Twice in twenty years—almost forty if we count the good days before … anyway, twice in twenty years doesn’t constitute child neglect. It’s a wonder that this family can stand one another, we’ve been cooped up together so long.”

Sarai looked at the tabletop, lost in thought. “But wouldn’t the news people find me?”

“I bet not,” said Sol. “It’s Rachel they seem to key on. If they do hound you, come home. But I bet you can have a week visiting everyone at home before the teeps catch on.”

“A week,” gasped Sarai. “I couldn’t …”

“Of course you can. In fact, you
must
. It will give me a few days to spend more time with Rachel and then when you come back refreshed I’ll spend some days selfishly working on the book.”

“The Kierkegaard one?”

“No. Something I’ve been playing with called
The Abraham Problem
.”

“Clumsy title,” said Sarai.

“It’s a clumsy problem,” said Sol. “Now go get packed. We’ll fly you to New Jerusalem tomorrow so you can ’cast out before the Sabbath begins.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said, sounding unconvinced.

“You’ll
pack
,” said Sol, hugging her again. When the hug was completed he had turned her away from the window so that she faced the hallway and the bedroom door. “Go. When you return from home I’ll have thought of something we
can
do.”

Sarai paused. “Do you promise?”

Sol looked at her. “I promise I will before time destroys everything. I swear as Rachel’s father that I’ll find a way.”

Sarai nodded, more relaxed than he had seen her in months. “I’ll go pack,” she said.

   When he and the child returned from New Jerusalem the next day, Sol went out to water the meager lawn while Rachel played quietly inside. When he came in, the pink glow of sunset infusing
the walls with a sense of sea warmth and quiet, Rachel was not in her bedroom or the other usual places. “Rachel?”

When there was no answer he checked the backyard again, the empty street.

“Rachel!” Sol ran in to call the neighbors but suddenly there was the slightest of sounds from the deep closet Sarai used for storage. Sol quietly opened the screen panel.

Rachel sat beneath the hanging clothes, Sarai’s antique pine box open between her legs. The floor was littered with photos and holo-chips of Rachel as a high school student, Rachel on the day she set off for college, Rachel standing in front of a carved mountainside on Hyperion. Rachel’s research comlog lay whispering on the four-year-old Rachel’s lap. Sol’s heart seized at the familiar sound of the confident young woman’s voice.

“Daddy,” said the child on the floor, her own voice a tiny frightened echo of the voice on the comlog, “you never told me that I had a sister.”

“You don’t, little one.”

Rachel frowned. “Is this Mommy when she was … not so big? Uh-uh, it can’t be.
Her
name’s Rachel, too, she says. How can …”

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ll explain …” Sol realized that the phone was ringing in the living room, had been ringing. “Just a moment, sweetie. I’ll be right back.”

The holo that formed above the pit was of a man Sol had never seen before. Sol did not activate his own imager, eager to get rid of the caller. “Yes?” he said abruptly.

“M. Weintraub? M. Weintraub who used to live on Barnard’s World, currently in the village of Dan on Hebron?”

Sol started to disconnect and then paused. Their access code was unfiled. Occasionally a salesperson called from New Jerusalem, but offworld calls were rare. And, Sol suddenly realized, his stomach feeling a stab of cold,
it was past sundown on the Sabbath
. Only emergency holo calls were allowed.

“Yes?” said Sol.

“M. Weintraub,” said the man, staring blindly past Sol, “there’s been a terrible accident.”

* * *

When Rachel awoke her father was sitting by the side of her bed. He looked tired. His eyes were red and his cheeks were gray with stubble above the line of his beard.

“Good morning, Daddy.”

“Good morning, sweetheart.”

Rachel looked around and blinked. Some of her dolls and toys and things were there, but the room was not hers. The light was different. The air felt different. Her daddy looked different. “Where are we, Daddy?”

“We’ve gone on a trip, little one.”

“Where to?”

“It doesn’t matter right now. Hop out, sweetie. Your bath is ready and then we have to get dressed.”

A dark dress she had never seen before lay at the base of her bed. Rachel looked at the dress and then back at her father. “Daddy, what’s the matter? Where’s Mommy?”

Sol rubbed his cheek. It was the third morning since the accident. It was the day of the funeral. He had told her each of the preceding days because he could not imagine lying to her then; it seemed the ultimate betrayal—of both Sarai and Rachel. But he did not think he could do it again. “There’s been an accident, Rachel,” he said, his voice a pained rasp. “Mommy died. We’re going to go say goodbye to her today.” Sol paused. He knew by now that it would take a minute for the fact of her mother’s death to become real for Rachel. On the first day he had not known if a four-year-old could truly comprehend the concept of death. He knew now that Rachel could.

Later, as he held the sobbing child, Sol tried to understand the accident he had described so briefly to her. EMVs were by far the safest form of personal transportation mankind had ever designed. Their lifters could fail but, even so, the residual charge in the EM generators would allow the aircar to descend safely from any altitude. The basic, failsafe design of an EMV’s collision-avoidance equipment had not changed in centuries. But everything failed. In this case it was a joy-riding teenage couple in a stolen EMV outside the
traffic lanes, accelerating to Mach 1.5 with all lights and transponders off to avoid detection, who defied all odds by colliding with Aunt Tetha’s ancient Vikken as it descended toward the Bussard City Opera House landing apron. Besides Tetha and Sarai and the teenagers, three others died in the crash as pieces of falling vehicles cartwheeled into the crowded atrium of the Opera House itself.

Sarai
.

“Will we ever see Mommy again?” Rachel asked between sobs. She had asked this each time.

“I don’t know, sweetheart,” responded Sol truthfully.

   The funeral was at the family cemetery in Kates County on Barnard’s World. The press did not invade the graveyard itself but teeps hovered beyond the trees and pressed against the black iron gate like an angry storm tide.

Richard wanted Sol and Rachel to stay a few days, but Sol knew what pain would be inflicted on the quiet farmer if the press continued their assault. Instead, he hugged Richard, spoke briefly to the clamoring reporters beyond the fence, and fled to Hebron with a stunned and silent Rachel in tow.

Newsteeps followed to New Jerusalem and then attempted to follow to Dan, but military police overrode their chartered EMVs, threw a dozen in jail as an example, and revoked the farcaster visas of the rest.

   In the evening Sol walked the ridge lines above the village while Judy watched his sleeping child. He found that his dialogue with God was audible now and he resisted the urge to shake his fist at the sky, to shout obscenities, to throw stones. Instead he asked questions, always ending with—Why?