The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (103 page)

Sol, the Consul, Father Duré, and the unconscious Het Masteen were in the first of the Cave Tombs when they heard the shots. The Consul went out alone, slowly, carefully, testing for the storm of time tides which had driven them deeper into the valley.

“It’s all right,” he called back. The pale glow of Sol’s lantern lighted the back of the cave, illuminating three, pale faces and the robed bundle that was the Templar. “The tides have lessened,” called the Consul.

Sol stood. His daughter’s face was a pale oval below his own. “Are you sure the shots came from Brawne’s gun?”

The Consul motioned toward the darkness outside. “None of the rest of us carried a slugthrower. I’ll go check.”

“Wait,” said Sol, “I’ll go with you.”

Father Duré remained kneeling next to Het Masteen. “Go ahead. I’ll stay with him.”

“One of us will check back within the next few minutes,” said the Consul.

The valley glowed from the pale light of the Time Tombs. Wind roared from the south, but the airstream was higher tonight, above the cliff walls, and the dunes on the valley floor were not disturbed. Sol followed the Consul as he picked his way down the rough trail to the valley floor and turned toward the head of the valley. Slight tugs of
déjà vu
reminded Sol of the violence of time tides an hour earlier, but now even the remnants of the bizarre storm were fading.

Where the trail widened on the valley floor, Sol and the Consul walked together past the scorched battlefield of the Crystal Monolith, the tall structure exuding a milky glow reflected by the countless shards littering the floor of the arroyo, then climbing slightly past the Jade
Tomb with its pale-green phosphorescence, then turning again and following the gentle switchbacks leading up to the Sphinx.

“My God,” whispered Sol and rushed forward, trying not to jar his sleeping child in her carrier. He knelt by the dark figure on the top step.

“Brawne?” asked the Consul, stopping two paces back and panting for breath after the sudden climb.

“Yes.” Sol started to lift her head and then jerked his hand back when he encountered something slick and cool extruding from her skull.

“Is she dead?”

Sol held his daughter’s head closer to his chest as he checked for a pulse in the woman’s throat. “No,” he said and took a deep breath. “She’s alive … but unconscious. Give me your light.”

Sol took the flashlight and played it over Brawne Lamia’s sprawled form, following the silver cord—“tentacle” was a better description, since the thing had a fleshy mass to it that made one think of organic origins—which led from the neural shunt socket in her skull across the broad top step of the Sphinx, in through the open portal. The Sphinx itself glowed the brightest of any of the Tombs, but the entrance was very dark.

The Consul came closer. “What is it?” He reached out to touch the silver cable, jerked his hand back as quickly as Sol had. “My God, it’s warm.”

“It feels alive,” agreed Sol. He had been chafing Brawne’s hands, and now he slapped her checks lightly, trying to awaken her. She did not stir. He swiveled and played the flashlight beam along the cable where it snaked out of sight down the entrance corridor. “I don’t think this is something she voluntarily attached herself to.”

“The Shrike,” said the Consul. He leaned closer to activate bio-monitor readouts on Brawne’s wrist comlog. “Everything is normal except her brain waves, Sol.”

“What do they say?”

“They say that she’s dead. Brain dead at least. No higher functions whatsoever.”

Sol sighed and rocked back on his heels. “We have to see where that cable goes.”

“Can’t we just unhook it from the shunt socket?”

“Look,” said Sol and played the light on the back of Brawne’s head while lifting a mass of dark curls away. The neural shunt, normally a
plasflesh disk a few millimeters wide with a ten-micrometer socket, had seemed to melt … flesh rising in a red welt to connect with the microlead extensions of the metal cable.

“It would take surgery to remove that,” whispered the Consul. He touched the angry-looking welt of flesh. Brawne did not stir. The Consul retrieved the flashlight and stood. “You stay with her. I’ll follow it in.”

“Use the comm channels,” said Sol, knowing how useless they had been during the rise and fall of time tides.

The Consul nodded and moved forward quickly before fear made him hesitate.

The chrome cable snaked down the main corridor, turning out of sight beyond the room where the pilgrims had slept the night before. The Consul glanced in the room, the flashlight beam illuminating the blankets and packs they had left behind in their hurry.

He followed the cable around the bend in the corridor; through the central portal where the hallway broke into three narrower halls; up a ramp and right again down the narrow passage they had called “King Tut’s Highway” during their earlier explorations; then down a ramp; along a low tunnel where he had to crawl, placing his hands and knees carefully so as not to touch the flesh-warm metal tentacle; up an incline so steep that he had to climb it like a chimney; down a wider corridor he did not remember, where stones leaned inward toward the ceiling, moisture dripping; and then down steeply, slowing his descent only by losing skin on his palms and knees, crawling finally along a stretch longer than the Sphinx had appeared wide. The Consul was thoroughly lost, trusting in the cable to lead him back out when the time came.

“Sol,” he called at last, not believing for an instant that the communicator would carry through stone and time tides.

“Here,” came the barest whisper of the scholar’s voice.

“I’m way the hell inside,” the Consul whispered into his comlog. “Down a corridor I don’t remember us seeing before. It feels deep.”

“Did you find where the cable ends?”

“Yeah,” the Consul replied softly, sitting back to wipe sweat from his face with a handkerchief.

“Nexus?” asked Sol, referring to one of the countless terminal nodes where Web citizens could jack into the datasphere.

“No. The thing seems to flow directly into the stone of the floor here. The corridor ends here too. I’ve tried moving it, but the join is similar to where the neural shunt’s been welded to her skull. It just seems part of the rock.”

“Come on out,” came Sol’s voice over the rasp of static. “We’ll try to cut it off her.”

In the damp and darkness of the tunnel, the Consul felt true claustrophobia close on him for the first time in his life. He found it hard to breathe. He was sure that something was behind him in the darkness, closing off his air and only avenue of retreat. The pounding of his heart was almost audible in the tight stone crawlway.

He took slow breaths, wiped his face again, and forced the panic back. “That might kill her,” he said between slow gasps for air.

No answer. The Consul called again, but something had cut off their thin connection.

“I’m coming out,” he said into the silent instrument and turned around, playing his flashlight along the low tunnel.
Had the cable-tentacle twitched, or was that just a trick of light?

The Consul began crawling back the way he had come.

They had found Het Masteen at sunset, just minutes before the time storm struck. The Templar had been staggering when the Consul, Sol, and Duré had first seen him, and by the time they reached his fallen form, Masteen was unconscious.

“Carry him to the Sphinx,” said Sol.

At that moment, as if choreographed by the setting sun, the time tides flowed over them like a tidal wave of nausea and
déjà vu
. All three men fell to their knees. Rachel awoke and cried with the vigor of the newly born and terrified.

“Make for the valley entrance,” gasped the Consul, standing with Het Masteen draped over his shoulder. “Got to … get out … the valley.”

The three men moved toward the mouth of the valley, past the first tomb, the Sphinx, but the time tides became worse, blowing against them like a terrible wind of vertigo. Thirty meters beyond and they could climb no more. They fell to hands and knees, Het Masteen rolling across the hard-packed trail. Rachel had ceased wailing and writhed in discomfort.

“Back,” gasped Paul Duré. “Back down the valley. It was … better … below.”

They retraced their steps, staggering along the trail like three drunkards, each carrying a burden too precious to be dropped. Below the Sphinx they rested a moment, backs to a boulder, while the very fabric
of space and time seemed to shift and buckle around them. It was as if the world had been the surface of a flag and someone had unfurled it with an angry snap. Reality seemed to billow and fold, then plunge farther away, folding back like a wave cresting above them. The Consul left the Templar lying against the rock and fell to all fours, panting, fingers clinging to the soil in panic.

“The Möbius cube,” said the Templar, stirring, his eyes still closed. “We must have the Möbius cube.”

“Damn,” managed the Consul. He shook Het Masteen roughly. “Why do we need it? Masteen, why do we need it?” The Templar’s head bobbed back and forth limply. He was unconscious once again.

“I’ll get it,” said Duré. The priest looked ancient and ill, his face and lips pale.

The Consul nodded, lifted Het Masteen over his shoulder, helped Sol gain his feet, and staggered away down the valley, feeling the riptides of anti-entropic fields lessen as they moved farther away from the Sphinx.

Father Duré had climbed the trail, climbed the long stairway, and staggered to the entrance of the Sphinx, clinging to the rough stones there the way a sailor would cling to a thrown line in rough seas. The Sphinx seemed to totter above him, first tilting thirty degrees one way, then fifty the other. Duré knew that it was only the violence of the time tides distorting his senses, but it was enough to make him kneel and vomit on the stone.

The tides paused a moment, like a violent surf resting between terrible wave assaults, and Duré found his feet, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and stumbled into the dark tomb.

He had not brought a flashlight; stumbling, he felt his way along the corridor, appalled by the twin fantasies of touching something slick and cool in the darkness or of stumbling into the room where he was reborn and finding his own corpse there, still moldering from the grave. Duré screamed, but the sound was lost in the tornado roar of his own pulse as the time tides returned in force.

The sleeping room was dark, that terrible dark which means the total absence of light, but Duré’s eyes adjusted, and he realized that the Möbius cube itself was glowing slightly, telltales winking.

He stumbled across the cluttered room and grabbed the cube, lifting the heavy thing with a sudden burst of adrenaline. The Consul’s summary tapes had mentioned this artifact—Masteen’s mysterious luggage during the pilgrimage—as well as the fact that it was believed to hold
an erg, one of the alien forcefield creatures used to power a Templar treeship. Duré had no idea why the erg was important now, but he clutched the box to his chest as he struggled back down the corridor, outside and down the steps, deeper into the valley.

“Here!” called the Consul from the first Cave Tomb at the base of the cliff wall. “It’s better here.”

Duré staggered up the trail, almost dropping the cube in his confusion and sudden draining of energy; the Consul helped him the last thirty steps into the tomb.

It was better inside. Duré could feel the ebb and flow of time tides just beyond the cave entrance, but back in the rear of the cave, glow-globes revealing elaborate carvings in their cold light, it was almost normal. The priest collapsed next to Sol Weintraub and set the Möbius cube near the silent but staring form of Het Masteen.

“He just awakened as you approached,” whispered Sol. The baby’s eyes were very wide and very dark in the weak light.

The Consul dropped down next to the Templar. “Why do we need the cube? Masteen, why do we need it?”

Het Masteen’s gaze did not falter; he did not blink. “Our ally,” he whispered. “Our only ally against the Lord of Pain.” The syllables were etched with the distinctive dialect of the Templar world.

“
How
is it our ally?” demanded Sol, grabbing the man’s robe in both his fists. “How do we use it? When?”

The Templar’s gaze was set on something in the infinite distance. “We vied for the honor,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “The True Voice of the
Sequoia Sempervirens
was the first to contact the Keats retrieval cybrid … but
I
was one honored by the light of the Muir. It was the
Yggdrasill
, my
Yggdrasill
, which was offered in atonement for our sins against the Muir.” The Templar closed his eyes. A slight smile looked incongruous on his stem-featured face.

The Consul looked at Duré and Sol. “That sounds more like Shrike Cult terminology than Templar dogma.”

“Perhaps it is both,” whispered Duré. “There have been stranger coalitions in the history of theology.”

Sol lifted his palm to the Templar’s forehead. The tall man was burning up with fever. Sol rummaged through their only medpak in search of a pain derm or feverpatch. Finding one, he hesitated. “I don’t know if Templars are within standard med norms. I don’t want some allergy to kill him.”

The Consul took the feverpatch and applied it to the Templar’s frail upper arm. “They’re within the norm.” He leaned closer. “Masteen, what happened on the windwagon?”

The Templar’s eyes opened but remained unfocused. “Windwagon?”

“I don’t understand,” whispered Father Duré.

Sol took him aside. “Masteen never told his tale on the pilgrimage out,” he whispered. “He disappeared during our first night out on the windwagon. Blood was left behind—plenty of blood—as well as his luggage and the Möbius cube. But no Masteen.”

“What happened on the windwagon?” the Consul whispered again. He shook the Templar slightly to get his attention. “Think, True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen!”

The tall man’s face changed, his eyes coming into focus, the vaguely Asiatic features settling into familiar, stern lines. “I released the elemental from his confinement …”