The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (58 page)

We moved at impossible speed down congested dataways, passing datumplane couriers and other operator analogs like an EMV ripping past oxcarts. Then we were approaching a slow-time gate, leapfrogging gridlocked exiting operator analogs in some four-dimensional high jump.

I felt the inevitable nausea of transition as we came up out of the matrix. Light burned my retinas.
Real
light. Then the pain washed in and I slumped over the console and groaned.

“Come on, Brawne.” It was Johnny—or someone just like Johnny—helping me to my feet and moving us both toward the door.

“BB,” I gasped.

“No.”

I opened aching eyes long enough to see BB Surbringer draped across his console. His Stetson had fallen off and rolled to the floor. BB’s head had exploded, spattering most of the console with gray and red. His mouth was open and a thick white foam still issued from it. It looked like his eyes had melted.

Johnny caught me, half lifted me. “We have to go,” he whispered. “Someone will be here any minute.”

I closed my eyes and let him take me away from there.

* * *

I awoke to dim red light and the sound of water dripping. I smelled sewage, mildew, and the ozone of uninsulated fiberoptic cables. I opened one eye.

We were in a low space more cave than room with cables snaking from a shattered ceiling and pools of water on the slime-caked tiles. The red light came from somewhere beyond the cave—a maintenance access shaft perhaps, or automech tunnel. I moaned softly. Johnny was there, moving from the rough bedroll of blankets to my side. His face was darkened with grease or dirt and there was at least one fresh cut.

“Where are we?”

He touched my cheek. His other arm went around my shoulders and helped me to a sitting position. The awful view shifted and tilted and for a moment I thought I was going to be sick. Johnny helped me drink water from a plastic tumbler.

“Dregs’ Hive,” said Johnny.

I’d guessed even before I was fully conscious. Dregs’ Hive is the deepest pit on Lusus, a no man’s land of mech tunnels and illegal burrows occupied by half the Web’s outcasts and outlaws. It was in Dregs’ Hive that I’d been shot several years ago and still bore the laser scar above my left hipbone.

I held the tumbler out for more water. Johnny fetched some from a steel therm and came back. I panicked for a second as I fumbled in my tunic pocket and on my belt: Dad’s automatic was gone. Johnny held the weapon up and I relaxed, accepting the cup and drinking thirstily. “BB?” I said, hoping for a moment that it had all been a terrible hallucination.

Johnny shook his head. “There were defenses that neither of us had anticipated. BB’s incursion was brilliant, but he couldn’t outfight Core omega phages. But half the operators in datumplane felt echoes of the battle. BB is already the stuff of legend.”

“Fucking great,” I said and gave a laugh that sounded suspiciously like the beginning of a sob. “The stuff of legend. And BB’s dead. For fuck-all nothing.”

Johnny’s arm was tight around me. “Not for nothing, Brawne. He made the grab. And passed the data to me before he died.”

I managed to sit fully upright and to look at Johnny. He seemed the same—the same soft eyes, same hair, same voice. But something was subtly different, deeper. More human? “You?” I said. “Did you make the transfer? Are you …”

“Human?” John Keats smiled at me. “Yes, Brawne. Or as close to human as someone forged in the Core could ever be.”

“But you remember … me … BB … what’s happened.”

“Yes. And I remember first looking into Chapman’s Homer. And my brother Tom’s eyes as he hemorrhaged in the night. And Severn’s kind voice when I was too weak to open my own eyes to face my fate. And our night in Piazza di Spagna when I touched your lips and imagined Fanny’s cheek against mine. I remember, Brawne.”

For a second I was confused, and then hurt, but then he set his palm against my cheek and
he
touched me, there was no one else, and I understood. I closed my eyes. “Why are we here?” I whispered against his shirt.

“I couldn’t risk using a farcaster. The Core could trace us at once. I considered the spaceport but you were in no condition to travel. I chose the Dregs’.”

I nodded against him. “They’ll try to kill you.”

“Yes.”

“Are the local cops after us? The Hegemony police? Transit cops?”

“No, I don’t think so. The only ones who’ve challenged us so far were two bands of goondas and some of the Dregs’ dwellers.”

I opened my eyes. “What happened with the goondas?” There were more deadly hoodlums and contract killers in the Web but I’d never run across any.

Johnny held up Dad’s automatic and smiled.

“I don’t remember anything after BB,” I said.

“You were injured by the phage backlash. You could walk but we were the cause of more than a few odd looks in the Concourse.”

“I bet. Tell me about what BB discovered. Why is the Core obsessed with Hyperion?”

“Eat first,” said Johnny. “It’s been more than twenty-eight hours.” He crossed the dripping width of the cave room and returned with a self-heating packet. It was basic holo fanatic fare—flash-dried and reheated cloned beef, potatoes which had never seen soil, and carrots which looked like some sort of deep-sea slugs. Nothing had ever tasted so good.

“OK,” I said, “tell me.”

   “The TechnoCore has been divided into three groups for as long as the Core has existed,” said Johnny. “The Stables are the old-line AIs, some of them dating back to pre-Mistake days; at least one of them gained sentience in the First Information Age. The Stables argue that a certain level of symbiosis is necessary between humanity and the Core. They’ve promoted the Ultimate Intelligence Project as a way to avoid rash decisions, to delay until all variables can be factored. The Volatiles are the force behind the Secession three centuries ago. The Volatiles have done conclusive studies that show how humankind’s usefulness is past and from this point on human beings constitute a threat to the Core. They advocate immediate and total extinction.”

“Extinction,” I said. After a moment I asked, “Can they do it?”

“Of humans in the Web, yes,” said Johnny. “Core intelligences not only create the infrastructure for Hegemony society but are necessary for everything from FORCE deployment to the failsafes on stockpiled nuclear and plasma arsenals.”

“Did you know about this when you were … in the Core?”

“No,” said Johnny. “As a pseudo-poet cybrid retrieval project, I was a freak, a pet, a partial thing allowed to roam the Web the way a pet is let out of the house each day. I had no idea there were three camps of AI influence.”

“Three camps,” I said. “What’s the third? And where does Hyperion come in?”

“Between the Stables and the Volatiles are the Ultimates. For the past five centuries the Ultimates have been obsessed with the UI
Project. The existence or extinction of the human race is of interest to them only in how it applies to the project. To this date, they have been a force for moderation, an ally of the Stables, because it is their perception that such reconstruction and retrieval projects as the Old Earth experiment are necessary to the culmination of the UI.

“Recently, however, the Hyperion issue has caused the Ultimates to move toward the Volatiles’ views. Since Hyperion was explored four centuries ago, the Core has been concerned and nonplussed. It was immediately obvious that the so-called Time Tombs were artifacts launched backward in time from a point at least ten thousand years in the galaxy’s future. More disturbing, however, is the fact that Core predictive formulae have
never
been able to factor the Hyperion variable.

“Brawne, to understand this, you must realize how much the Core relies upon prediction. Already, without UI input, the Core knows the details of the physical, human, and AI future to a margin of 98.9995 percent for a period of at least two centuries. The AI Advisory Council to the All Thing with its vague, delphic utterances—considered so indispensable by humans—is a joke. The Core drops tidbits of revelations to the Hegemony when it serves the Core’s purposes—sometimes to aid the Volatiles, sometimes the Stables, but
always
to please the Ultimates.

“Hyperion is a rent in the entire predictive fabric of the Core’s existence. It is the penultimate oxymoron—a nonfactorable variable. Impossible as it seems, Hyperion appears to be exempt from the laws of physics, history, human psychology, and AI prediction as practiced by the Core.

“The result has been two futures—two
realities
if you will—one in which the Shrike scourge soon to be released on the Web and interstellar humanity is a weapon from the Core-dominated future, a retroactive first strike from the Volatiles who rule the galaxy millennia hence. The other reality sees the Shrike invasion, the coming interstellar war, and the other products of the Time Tombs’ opening as a
human
fist struck back through time, a final, twilight effort by the Ousters, ex-colonials, and other small bands of humans who escaped the Volatiles’ extinction programs.”

* * *

Water dripped on tile. Somewhere in the tunnels nearby a mech cauterizer’s warning siren echoed from ceramic and stone. I leaned against the wall and stared at Johnny.

“Interstellar war,” I said. “Both scenarios demand an interstellar war?”

“Yes. There is no escaping that.”

“Can both Core groups be wrong in their prediction?”

“No. What happens on
Hyperion
is problematic, but the disruption in the Web and elsewhere is quite clear. The Ultimates use this knowledge as the prime argument for hurrying the next step in Core evolution.”

“And what did BB’s stolen data show about us, Johnny?”

Johnny smiled, touched my hand, but did not hold it. “It showed that I am somehow part of the Hyperion unknown. Their creation of a Keats cybrid was a terrible gamble. Only my apparent lack of success as a Keats analog allowed the Stables to preserve me. When I made up my mind to go to Hyperion, the Volatiles killed me with the clear intention of obliterating my AI existence if my cybrid again made that decision.”

“You did. What happened?”

“They failed. In the Core’s limitless arrogance, they failed to take two things into account. First, that I might invest all consciousness in my cybrid and thus change the nature of the Keats analog. Second, that I would go to you.”

“
Me!
”

He took my hand. “Yes, Brawne. It seems that you also are part of the Hyperion unknown.”

I shook my head. Realizing that there was a numbness in my scalp above and behind my left ear, I raised my hand, half expecting to find damage from the datumplane fight. Instead, my fingers encountered the plastic of a neural shunt socket.

I jerked my other hand from Johnny’s grasp and stared at him in horror. He’d had me wired while I was unconscious.

Johnny held up both hands, palms toward me. “I had to, Brawne. It may be necessary for the survival of both of us.”

I made a fist. “You fucking low-life son of a bitch. Why do I need to interface directly, you lying bastard?”

“Not with the Core,” Johnny said softly. “With me.”

“You?” My arm and fist quivered with the anticipation of smashing his vat-cloned face. “You!” I sneered. “You’re human now, remember?”

“Yes. But certain cybrid functions remain. Do you remember when I touched your hand several days ago and brought us to datumplane?”

I stared at him. “I’m not going to datumplane again.”

“No. Nor am I. But I may need to relay incredible amounts of data to you within a very short period of time. I brought you to a black market surgeon in the Dregs’ last night. She implanted a Schrön disk.”

“Why?” The Schrön loop was tiny, no larger than my thumbnail, and very expensive. It held countless field-bubble memories, each capable of holding near infinite bits of information. Schrön loops could not be accessed by the biological carrier and thus were used for courier purposes. A man or woman could carry AI personalities or entire planetary dataspheres in a Schrön loop. Hell, a
dog
could carry all that.

“Why?” I said again, wondering if Johnny or some forces behind Johnny were using me as such a courier. “Why?”

Johnny moved closer and put his hand around my fist. “Trust me, Brawne.”

I don’t think I’d trusted anyone since Dad blew his brains out twenty years ago and Mom retreated into the pure selfishness of her seclusion. There was no reason in the universe to trust Johnny now.

But I did.

I relaxed my fist and took his hand.

“All right,” said Johnny. “Finish your meal and we’ll get busy trying to save our lives.”

   Weapons and drugs were the two easiest things to buy in Dregs’ Hive. We spent the last of Johnny’s considerable stash of black marks to buy weapons.

By 2200 hours, we each wore whiskered titan-poly body armor. Johnny had a goonda’s mirror-black helmet and I wore a FORCE-surplus command mask. Johnny’s power gauntlets were massive and a bright red. I wore osmosis gloves with killing trim. Johnny carried an Ouster hellwhip captured on Bressia and had tucked a laser wand in his belt. Along with Dad’s automatic, I now carried a Steiner-Ginn mini-gun on a gyroed waist brace. It was slaved to my command visor and I could keep both hands free while firing.

Johnny and I looked at each other and began giggling. When the laughter stopped there was a long silence.

“Are you sure the Shrike Temple here on Lusus is our best chance?” I asked for the third or fourth time.

“We can’t farcast,” said Johnny. “All the Core has to do is record a malfunction and we’re dead. We can’t even take an elevator from the lower levels. We’ll have to find unmonitored stairways and climb the hundred and twenty floors. The best chance to make the Temple is straight down the Concourse Mall.”

“Yes, but will the Shrike Church people take us in?”

Johnny shrugged, a strangely insectoid gesture in his combat outfit. The voice through the goonda helmet was metallic. “They’re the only group which has a vested interest in our survival. And the only ones with enough political pull to shield us from the Hegemony while finding transit for us to Hyperion.”