The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (91 page)

“Except for the minimal amount required in OCS, which amounts to a few history courses, no, sir, I have not.”

“Have you ever been involved in
any
strategic planning above the level of … how many naval surface ships did you command on Maui-Covenant, Commander?”

“One, sir.”

“One,” breathed Morpurgo. “A large ship, Commander?”

“No, sir.”

“Were you given command of this ship, Commander. Did you earn it? Or did it fall to you through the vicissitudes of war?”

“Our captain was killed, sir. I took command by default. It was the final naval action of the Maui-Covenant campaign and—”

“That will be all,
Commander.”
Morpurgo turned his back on the war hero and addressed the CEO. “Do you wish to poll us again, ma’am?”

Gladstone shook her head.

Senator Kolchev cleared his throat. “Perhaps we should have a closed cabinet meeting at Government House.”

“No need,” said Meina Gladstone. “I’ve decided. Admiral Singh, you are authorized to divert as many fleet units to the Hyperion system as you and the joint chiefs see fit.”

“Yes, CEO.”

“Admiral Nashita, I will expect a successful termination of hostilities within one standard week of the time you have adequate reinforcements.” She looked around the table. “Ladies and gentlemen, I cannot stress to you enough the importance of our possession of Hyperion and the deterrent of Ouster threats once and for all.” She rose and walked to the base of the ramp leading up and out into the darkness. “Good evening, gentlemen, ladies.”

It was almost 0400 hours Web and Tau Ceti Center time when Hunt rapped at my door. I had been fighting sleep for the three hours since we ’cast back. I had just decided that Gladstone had forgotten about me and was beginning to doze when the knock came.

“The garden,” said Leigh Hunt, “and for God’s sake tuck your shirt in.”

My boots made soft noises on the fine gravel of the path as I wandered the dark lanes. The lanterns and glow-globes barely emitted light. The stars were not visible above the courtyard because of the glare of TC
²
’s interminable cities, but the running lights of the orbital habitations moved across the sky like an endless ring of fireflies.

Gladstone was sitting on the iron bench near the bridge.

“M. Severn,” she said, her voice low, “thank you for joining me. I apologize for it being so late. The cabinet meeting just broke up.”

I said nothing and remained standing.

“I wanted to ask about your visit to Hyperion this morning.” She chuckled in the darkness. “Yesterday morning. Did you have any impressions?”

I wondered what she meant. My guess was that the woman had an insatiable appetite for data, no matter how seemingly irrelevant. “I did meet someone,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Yes, Dr. Melio Arundez. He was … is …”

“… a friend of M. Weintraub’s daughter,” finished Gladstone. “The child who is aging backward. Do you have any updates on her condition?”

“Not really,” I said. “I had a brief nap today, but the dreams were fragmented.”

“And what did the meeting with Dr. Arundez accomplish?”

I rubbed my chin with fingers suddenly gone cold. “His research team has been waiting in the capital for months,” I said. “They may be our only hope for understanding what’s going on with the Tombs. And the Shrike …”

“Our predictors say that it is important that the pilgrims be left alone until their act is played out,” came Gladstone’s voice in the darkness. She seemed to be looking to the side, toward the stream.

I felt sudden, inexplicable, implacable anger surge through me. “Father Hoyt is already ‘played out,’ ” I said more sharply than I intended. “They could have saved him if the ship had been allowed to rendezvous with the pilgrims. Arundez and his people might be able to save the baby—Rachel—even though there are only a few days left.”

“Less than three days,” said Gladstone. “Was there anything else? Any impressions of the planet or Admiral Nashita’s command ship which you found … interesting?”

My hands clenched into fists, relaxed. “You won’t allow Arundez to fly up to the Tombs?”

“Not now, no.”

“What about the evacuation of civilians from Hyperion? At least the Hegemony citizens?”

“That is not a possibility at this time.”

I started to say something, checked myself. I stared at the sound of the water beneath the bridge.

“No other impressions, M. Severn?”

“No.”

“Well, I wish you a good night and pleasant dreams. Tomorrow may be a very hectic day, but I do want to talk to you about those dreams at some point.”

“Good night,” I said and turned on my heel and walked quickly back to my wing of Government House.

In the darkness of my room, I called up a Mozart sonata and took three trisecobarbitals. Most probably they would knock me out in a drugged, dreamless sleep, where the ghost of dead Johnny Keats and his even more ghostly pilgrims could not find me. It meant disappointing Meina Gladstone, and that did not dismay me in the least.

I thought of Swift’s sailor, Gulliver, and his disgust with mankind after his return from the land of the intelligent horses—the Houyhnhnms—a disgust with his own species which grew to the point that he had to sleep in the stables with the horses just to be reassured by their smell and presence.

My last thought before sleep was
To hell with Meina Gladstone, to hell with the war, and to hell with the Web
.

And to hell with dreams
.

PART TWO

SIXTEEN

Brawne Lamia slept fitfully just before dawn, and her dreams were filled with images and sounds from elsewhere—half-heard and little-understood conversations with Meina Gladstone, a room that seemed to be floating in space, a movement of men and women along corridors where the walls whispered like a poorly tuned fatline receiver—and underlying the feverish dreams and random images was the maddening sense that Johnny—her Johnny—was so close,
so close
. Lamia cried out in her sleep, but the noise was lost in the random echoes of the Sphinx’s cooling stones and shifting sands.

Lamia awoke suddenly, coming completely conscious as surely as a solid-state instrument switching on. Sol Weintraub had been supposed to be standing guard, but now he slept near the low door of the room where the group sheltered. His infant daughter, Rachel, slept between blankets on the floor next to him; her rump was raised, face pressed against the blanket, a slight bubble of saliva on her lips.

Lamia looked around. In the dim illumination from a low-wattage glow-globe and the faint daylight reflected down four meters of corridor, only one other of her fellow pilgrims was visible, a dark bundle on the stone floor. Martin Silenus lay there snoring. Lamia felt a surge of fear, as if she had been abandoned while sleeping. Silenus, Sol, the baby … she realized that only the Consul was missing. Attrition had eaten at the pilgrimage party of seven adults and an infant: Het Masteen, missing on the windwagon crossing of the Sea of Grass; Lenar Hoyt killed the night before; Kassad missing later that night … the Consul … where was the Consul?

Brawne Lamia looked around again, satisfied herself that the dark room held nothing but packs, blanket bundles, the sleeping poet, scholar and child, and then she rose, found her father’s automatic pistol amidst
the tumble of blankets, felt in her pack for the neural stunner, and then slipped past Weintraub and the baby into the corridor beyond.

It was morning and so bright out that Lamia had to shield her eyes with her hand as she stepped from the Sphinx’s stone steps onto the hard-packed trail which led away down the valley. The storm had passed. Hyperion’s skies were a deep, crystalline lapis lazuli shot through with green, Hyperion’s star, a brilliant white point source just rising above the eastern cliff walls. Rock shadows blended with the outflung silhouettes of the Time Tombs across the valley floor. The Jade Tomb sparkled. Lamia could see the fresh drifts and dunes deposited by the storm, white and vermilion sands blending in sensuous curves and striations around stone. There was no evidence of their campsite the night before. The Consul sat on a rock ten meters down the hill. He was gazing down the valley, and smoke spiraled upward from his pipe. Slipping the pistol in her pocket with the stunner, Lamia walked down the hill to him.

“No sign of Colonel Kassad,” said the Consul as she approached. He did not turn around.

Lamia looked down the valley to where the Crystal Monolith stood. Its once-gleaming surface was pocked and pitted, the upper twenty or thirty meters appeared to be missing, and debris still smoked at its base. The half kilometer or so between the Sphinx and the Monolith were scorched and cratered. “It looks as if he didn’t leave without a fight,” she said.

The Consul grunted. The pipe smoke made Lamia hungry. “I searched as far as the Shrike Palace, two klicks down the valley,” said the Consul. “The locus of the firefight seems to have been the Monolith. There’s still no sign of a ground-level opening to the thing but there are enough holes farther up now so that you can see the honeycomb pattern which deep radar has always shown inside.”

“But no sign of Kassad?”

“None.”

“Blood? Scorched bones? A note saying that he’d be back after delivering his laundry?”

“Nothing.”

Brawne Lamia sighed and sat on a boulder near the Consul’s rock. The sun was warm on her skin. She squinted out toward the opening to the valley. “Well, hell,” she said, “what do we do next?”

The Consul removed his pipe, frowned at it, and shook his head. “I
tried the comlog relay again this morning, but the ship is still penned in.” He shook ashes out. “Tried the emergency bands too, but obviously we’re not getting through. Either the ship isn’t relaying, or people have orders not to respond.”

“Would you really leave?”

The Consul shrugged. He had changed from his diplomatic finery of the day before into a rough wool pullover tunic top, gray whipcord trousers, and high boots. “Having the ship here would give us—you—the option of leaving. I wish the others would consider going. After all, Masteen’s missing, Hoyt and Kassad are gone … I’m not sure what to do next.”